The Leon Polk Smith Foundation is pleased to announce Leon Polk Smith: Circle and Square, 1948-1987, a solo exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston that offers a comprehensive survey of Smith’s exploration of geometric form across four decades.
Running from September 13 through October 18, 2025, this exhibition marks an important milestone as Smith’s first solo show at the gallery and the first presentation to place his editioned prints in the context of his paintings, drawings, and collages.
A Lifetime of Dedicated Investigation
The exhibition traces Smith’s masterful investigation of circles, squares, and triangles from 1948 to 1987, revealing how he developed and refined his revolutionary approach to form-space equilibrium. As Smith himself described his breakthrough:
“What I was seeking through the 1940s was to find my outlet from this vertical/horizontal and to express the same thing that Mondrian had worked with, that is the form-space equilibrium, the interchangeability of form and space. I wanted to find a way of using that in a curvilinear manner, in curved lines, free forms. It looks so very simple. I always thought it looked as if an idiot could have done it overnight. But I was seven or eight years finding that.”
Pioneer of Hard-Edge Abstraction
Born in Oklahoma Territory to Cherokee immigrant parents, Smith’s path to becoming a pioneer of geometric abstraction was shaped by his early exposure to Native American art and culture. After studying at Columbia University’s Teachers College, he returned to New York City, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1941.
Over the next six decades, Smith sustained a growing reputation as an early and continuing innovator in reductive geometric abstraction and complex, multi-part shaped canvases. In the 1950s and ’60s, younger painters including Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman visited his studio, placing his work at a pivotal moment in the transition from gestural to hard-edge abstraction.
The Creative Process
Smith’s approach to painting was both intuitive and deeply considered. As he explained:
“I think that the proportion of the canvas comes first. I have a feeling that I want to do a canvas about a certain size, and I don’t know just what I am going to paint so I stretch it to size and hang it on the wall and sit down and look at it… And then the proportion, the size of the canvas often suggests a form. I will get up and draw this one line through the canvas which creates two forms, one on either side of the line, and while I am drawing this line, it seems that I am traveling many, many miles in space… and I begin to feel the tensions develop and the forces working on either side of this line.”
This exhibition showcases how Smith’s exploration of circles, squares, and their interrelationships in positive and negative space evolved throughout his career, demonstrating the visual and spatial tensions he so carefully orchestrated.
Exhibition Details
Leon Polk Smith: Circle and Square, 1948-1987
Krakow Witkin Gallery
September 13 – October 18, 2025
The Leon Polk Smith Foundation extends its gratitude to Krakow Witkin Gallery and Betsy Senior Fine Art for making this exhibition possible.
For more information, visit Krakow Witkin Gallery’s website.