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PANOPLY
Nick Smith -
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This September, RHODES proudly presents Panoply, a solo exhibition by leading British artist Nick Smith. Marking ten years of collaboration, this landmark exhibition reflects on a decade of Smith's artistic practice.
The show features fourteen new original collage works, revisiting and re-examining themes from Smith’s past exhibitions and career-long conversations. In Panoply, Smith reflects on the iconic imagery that has defined his work to date, taking a moment to look back and embrace the visual language that made him one of our most sought-after artists.
Over the past decade, Smith has staged twelve major solo exhibitions and released over twenty sell-out prints. His distinctive aesthetic, blending vibrant colour, cultural icons, and pixelated compositions, has earned him international recognition for its playful yet meticulous interrogation of language and perception.
This body of work offers a final opportunity to engage with these celebrated themes: a send-off to the imagery that has shaped Smith’s artistic journey. Highlights include microchip reinterpretations of art historical icons such as Son of Man and American Gothic, as well as a return to his acclaimed Psalms series, where his signature humour brings Heinz Ketchup branding to life.
Panoply provides a reflective space to engage with Smith's ongoing artistic exploration in relation to the varying routes his work has taken since 2015. The exhibition encompasses varied aspects of his creative journey, from personal identity to broader cultural commentary, highlighting Smith's nuanced visual language and narrative depth. We invite you to explore this significant milestone exhibition, celebrating ten years of Nick Smith’s dedicated artistic enquiry and creativity.
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Full details of all artworks below:
All of the artworks in this exhibition are unique 1/1 original works -
NICK SMITH, $139,400,000, 2025 🔴
“Priceless was one of my favourite series, created in 2018 to make immense values tangible. Picasso’s portrait sold for $139.4 million… mine is built from 2,064 individual colour chips, giving each one a value of $67,538.76. A slightly more tangible number for something otherwise untouchable. It’s about time, value, and the absurdity of trying to price an icon.” -
Nick smith, venus rising, 2025 🔴
"Venus Rising" grew from my 2022 exhibition Posed, where I sought to give voice to the muse… those silent figures in art who inspire but rarely speak. Inspired by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, I focused on that moment she emerges from the sea, carried by Zephyr and Aura, greeted by a Horae of Spring. It’s a scene rich with femininity, ceremony, and timeless cycles. Love, desire, fertility, and victory embodied in one figure. My collage gives her not just form, but voice… a meditation on beauty, spirituality, and the enduring power of the feminine muse, rising anew in every age.” -
NICK SMITH, Monday June 5th 1967, 2025 🔴
“The Pink Marilyn was the first collage I ever made, the piece that set me on this path… so for my decade celebration exhibition it felt only right to return to it, to remake it with everything I’ve learned since. I’ve always enjoyed reading Warhol’s diaries, which began almost ten years after his Marilyn series, and often wondered what he might have said about their creation. So I wrote my own fictional diary entry, a lost page from The Factory… dry, deadpan, full of mundane chaos and small absurdities, imagining the day all ten Marilyns came to life. Reading it back, it felt like something he might actually have said: that none of them were really her, but together, somehow, they were.” -
NICK SMITH, FULL OF GRACE, HALF IN FAITH, EMPTY AND ETERNAL, 2025 🔴
“This triptych takes Heinz Tomato Ketchup… full, half full, and empty… and treats it with the reverence usually reserved for holy objects. Written in psalm‑like verse, it’s an extension of my 2018 Psalms series, elevating a humble condiment into a vessel of ritual, memory and quiet devotion. The full bottle, stubborn as a saint, refuses to yield its non‑Newtonian glory without a seven‑fold slap; the half bottle reminds us to shake well, lest that orange watery sin spill forth; and the empty, a lament, begging and swirling vinegar for one last ghost of ketchup before laying the bottle to rest.”
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NICK SMITH, LIBERTY RESTORED, 2025 🔴
“In January 2024, while researching for my Paname exhibition, I visited Paris hoping to study Liberty Leading the People, only to find it off the wall for restoration. Gutted, I made my own version for the show based on the pre-restoration colours. A few months later, just after Paname closed, Liberty returned to the Louvre brighter and cleaner, with crisper whites and punchier tones. That transformation inspired me to remake the piece as a microchip study of its refreshed palette… a second chance at Liberty.” -
“I first started experimenting with tondos back in 2017. I loved how they translated into a pixelated image… close up the edge steps and fragments, but from a distance the eye smooths it into a clean curve. For Ourselves Unseen, the tondo felt particularly fitting: the text in the work depicts a young woman peering at an amorous scene through a peephole. Circular apertures carry connotations of lenses and focused views, which made this format the perfect pairing for the subject matter. These two works influenced by my Paramour series use that same idea. Intimate moments framed within a circle, glimpsed but never fully revealed.”
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“These small-scale Microchip works revisit some of the first subjects I explored in my career, back in my 2015 Psycolourgy exhibition. I wanted to bring this show full circle, revisiting some of my best-known images but translating them into a new, never-before-made ‘microchip’ format… each one distilled to its pure palette of colours, broken down and rebuilt as a precise grid. For me, these are a full stop, a final farewell to that imagery before moving on to the next chapter.”
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“I first explored Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring in 2015, altering just one detail… the earring to hot pink and gold, subtle changes that shifted the focus of the entire piece. For this 2025 triptych, I reimagined her in microchip form with three neon earrings. Pink, yellow and green, a nod to the bold colour and raw energy of the Dutch hardcore techno scene. It’s a meditation on how context and culture reshape an icon… asking who she might have been, had she lived not in Vermeer’s Delft, but in our own luminous, chaotic now.”
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NICK SMITH, EUREKA, 2025 🔴
“In 2021 I created Psycolourgy 2.0, a series of large-scale single colour chips exploring word /colour associations. Back then, I started with a word and searched for its colour. This time I reversed the process, beginning with the colour gold and looking for the word to match. I kept coming back to the story of Archimedes, tasked with proving whether a crown was pure gold, who famously leapt from his bath shouting Eureka! This chip, finished with 23.5ct gold leaf, felt like the perfect pairing… my own golden moment.”
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