Jeffrey Smart’s conception of the urban landscape formed one of the most original bodies of work in Australian art. In a career that spanned seven decades, a geometry of apartment blocks, autostradas and reflective road signs became his signature. Smart forged an idiosyncratic realist style that captured the stillness and beauty of the industrialised world with metaphysical nuance and a refined clarity of vision.

Every Smart work is a construction. Jeffrey Smart: constructed world explores how Smart used the process of drawing and constant revision to construct his distinctive urban vision. He said of his practice: ‘...in the end my pictures are completely synthetic. I move things around – change the height of buildings, colours, shadows, light – to get the composition right’.

Smart’s carefully constructed paintings belie the effort of their creation. Classically trained, his process was laborious, slowly working out the composition of a painting through many drawings and studies. He believed that ‘great painting is based on good drawing. A poor draughtsman cannot be a great painter’.

The artworks brought together in Jeffrey Smart: constructed world reflect the different stages and places of Smart’s career, from his early years in Adelaide, through the 1950s and early 1960s in Sydney, to his later years in Italy. On display 11 May to 29 September 2019, they include highlights from a major gift of drawings donated by his long-term partner Ermes De Zan alongside well-known paintings from the collection.