
Nick Smith
6
Works
2
Followers

Artist Spotlight
Nick Smith: From Pantone Chips to the Rijksmuseum
In February 2023, Nick Smith unveiled a monumental 3.2 by 2.8 meter artwork inside the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, reinterpreting Johannes Vermeer's iconic Milkmaid in his signature Pantone color chip style. Commissioned by Philips in collaboration with the museum, the piece was assembled from 192 individually painted panels created through community workshops with patients from Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven and Princess Maxima Centre in Utrecht. It was among the most ambitious public projects by any contemporary British artist that year, and it confirmed what collectors and curators had been… Continue reading
Collectors
Artists in conversation

Chuck Close

Close built large scale portrait paintings from gridded cells of color information, creating a direct parallel to Smith's method of decomposing iconic imagery into systematic color units that resolve into recognizable images at a distance.

Invader

Invader works with tile based pixelated grids drawn from early video game aesthetics to recreate pop cultural imagery, sharing Smith's geometric deconstruction approach and his interest in the intersection of digital culture and physical art making.
Devorah Sperber
Sperber reconstructs art historical masterworks using grids of color coded spools of thread, closely mirroring Smith's concept of translating famous images into orderly arrays of individually labeled color units that collectively form the original composition.
Artists who inspired them

Andy Warhol

Warhol pioneered the use of iconic pop cultural and art historical imagery as raw material for conceptual transformation, a strategy central to Smith's practice of reinterpreting famous images through a systematic and visually bold color based methodology.

Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein translated mass media imagery into graphic geometric patterns including his celebrated Benday dot technique, directly anticipating Smith's interest in breaking recognizable images into repeating color units derived from commercial and print culture.

Josef Albers

Albers developed a rigorous systematic exploration of color relationships and perception through geometric grid compositions, providing a foundational theoretical and visual language for Smith's color chip methodology and his investigation of how individual color squares interact to form larger images.





