Quickly propelled to prominence as a member of the so-called Kitchen Sink group alongside John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves, an artistic movement rooted in gritty realism, Jack Smith represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1956 at the age of just 28, and had his first retrospective at the Whitechapel gallery in 1959. In conversation with Alan Bowness in 1977, Smith described his move away from realism into his own highly individual artistic idiom in 1963: “At that time I suddenly had a revulsion against making what I considered to be compositional pictures, and I decided well, why shouldn’t a painting be like a list or an inventory. I remember standing in front of this canvas and trying to make an equivalent form for every object in my studio. One invented the forms, just as I invented forms equivalent to sounds in other pictures. It was that kind of invention, and yet it’s still based on a visual reality.” Although ostensibly abstract, Smith’s work, very much like that of Terry Frost, emanates from external reality, be that experiences of sensations, emotions, or simply the objects in a particular environment. Translating these encounters into painted form, Smith developed a personal language: “Previous forms have seemed inadequate…I had to start remaking a visual language that seemed real to me.” This new language is not, however, one of equivalents – a simplistic reading is denied. Instead, the paintings can be understood as diagrams, inventories, or graphs. Titles, including '13 Elements', are ambiguous but frequently reference the number of motifs at play in each work. Smith’s method of visual notation is embedded in music and musical composition. Economy of mark making, spacing and intervals, and colour associations reflect the relationship of silence and sound. Utilising systems of rational and logic to supress the very subjectivity of the experiences from which his work spring, Smith’s paintings are curiously detached and yet unmistakeably a product of his own hand. Although Smith frequently employed diamond-oriented canvases, the circular form of '13 Elements' is an unusual backing in the 1970s. Understated in muted colours with two halves offsetting each other in a delicate balance, '13 Elements' is an exquisite example of Smith’s restraint.