Terry smith studied BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths School of Art in 1974-78. In 1998 he was awarded the Henry Moore Fellowship at the Byam Shaw School of Art, the Sargent Fellowship in Rome in 1998/9, a research fellow at Field Institute, Hombroich Museum, Dusseldorf, 2002. In November 2008 he received The Paul Hamlyn Artist Award. He lives and works in Folkestone.

Terry Smith represents a surprisingly uncommon strand in the practice of contemporary art in the UK. His practice, which has been developing over forty years, has its roots in Anti-Form European and American conceptualism. In recent years he has created large-scale installations and site-specific interventions producing work often inaccessible to the public. In 1994 Smith began a series of building interventions by breaking into abandoned buildings and creating his first wall cuttings in houses ready to be demolished. He was also invited to make a series of secret interventions at Tate Modern during its reconstruction in 1996.

He’s had a number of solo exhibitions and group shows in London and international shows including, New York, Venice, Mexico City, Caracas, Barcelona, Stockholm, Vancouver and Boston.

Terry Smith’s most recent work, Walk Stand Still, is a performance piece in development produced with performers, Ash McNaughton and Lise Boucon, composer, John Woolrich and jazz flutist, Paul Cheneour, at the Quarterhouse Auditorium, Folkestone. The work is constructed through a series of workshops, exercises and tasks, with back-stage work recorded and shared as videos on Terry Smith’s website. Like Reworking Rembrandt, a project undertaken by Smith over 2020, in which the artist created a series of works based on a self-portrait of Rembrandt in his later years, the documentation of Walk Stand Still reveals ‘the method and the madness’, and is in-keeping with the artist’s engagement with process, rather than fixating on the permanency of the final artwork.

Read more about Terry Smith’s ongoing projects here: terrysmith.studio