Jeffrey Smart’s works are an exploration of the individual’s experience within urban surroundings, using cityscapes, bitumen highways, trucks, bus stops and road signs to turn the everyday into the exceptional, through the unequalled clarity and technical skill for which Jeffrey is renowned. His depictions of industrialisation, often with a single human figure, have been described as lonely and desolate, but for Jeffrey he sees the inherent beauty of its rhythmic forms and it is painting the real world around him, as he sees it.

“Sometimes I'll drive around for months despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me.. a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the germ of a picture.” - Jeffrey Smart (i)

For Smart the structure of the composition is as important as the subject matter, an extension of his lifelong passion for architecture. This can seen in his multiple studies for works which enable him to balance the elements within the picture and create complex compositions with such equilibrium as to appear simple, their structural geometry underpinning the meticulous detail of his work.

Jeffrey Smart is internationally recognised and represented in the National Gallery of Australia and all State Galleries, including five works in the Art Gallery of Western Australia; as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Lugano, Switzerland. He was awarded the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1951 and the Painters and Sculptors Association medal in 2006 in recognition of his significant contribution to Australian Art.

(i) Hawley, Janet (1993), Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland press
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