North Bar proudly presents painter Nick Smith's  'Borderlines' as our April exhibition.

Nick Smith is a graduate from Leeds Art University who was born in Oxford and now lives in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Having only been painting since 2020, he has quickly found his feet and love for architectural form. He has shown his work at the Ones to Watch 2022 exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills, and also in the Tinker Gallery in Ilkley, Open Gallery in Halifax, Skipton town hall and Fresh space in Hackney Wick, London. 

Smith's work explores the relationship between form and structure in dystopian abstract landscapes. He uses acrylic paint and pencil markings to create these landscapes.

He describes his work as a bold taking on the constructivist aesthetic, but with playful traces of the postmodern era. Lines and blocks suggest floors and walls arranged in compressed spaces and tied together by linear perspective and geometry.

Smith envisages these spaces as city vistas, playing with scale and tone, incorporating Grey as a symbol of urban materiality and as a resting buffer between passages of colour. Smith's work begins with pencil lines. These lines are like wires crossing and holding tension between objects, spaces and the broader edges of the painting support. These lines cross to form geometric outlines that can be filled with colour or tone to find positive surface expressions.

He has also exhibited in Friends of Ham in Ilkley, Assembly House in Leeds, Bini Brewery in  Seacroft, Leeds Art University and Left Bank, Leeds.

North Bar is open from 1pm - late on weekdays and 12pm - late on weekends.