Female Artists and Female Muses: Nick Smith’s portrait of value

Female Artists and Female Muses was an online-only group presentation by Peter Harrington Gallery on Artsy, dated 10 March–31 August 2026. Its 35-work checklist brought Nick Smith together with Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Gustav Klimt, Tracey Emin, Elisabeth Frink and Paula Rego. The pairing in the title offered two ways into this selection: women making images, and women becoming subjects within other artists’ images. Those positions overlap and complicate one another rather than forming two neat categories. Gallery’s exhibition.

A portrait divided into value

Smith’s contribution was Picasso – Marie Therese Walter., a 2018 giclée with screenprinted varnish on deckle-edged Fabriano 5 paper, published by Rhodes. The gallery listed impression 70/88. Its account explains that Smith rebuilt Picasso’s portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter using 414 coloured squares, each carrying the same monetary figure, calculated from the painting’s reported February 2018 auction result. A face becomes both an arrangement of colour and an account of how art is valued. Repeated monetary labels interrupt the act of looking: recognition of the sitter must compete with the language of exchange. Exact Smith work.

That intervention gains a particular setting here because the checklist also includes Picasso’s Femme au Chapeau, dated 1962, and Buste de femme à la queue de cheval: Jacqueline., dated 1955. Smith’s reworking therefore appears in the same selection as prints associated with another of Picasso’s portrait subjects. The comparison is not between interchangeable images of women. It draws attention to the distance between a named sitter, an artist’s treatment of her, and a later artist’s reconstruction of a famous image. Gallery checklist.

A different kind of line

The exhibition’s cover work, Emin’s Inside Your Heart., offers a contrasting encounter with a figure. Published by Counter Editions in 2014, it is a two-colour lithograph on Somerset paper, from an edition of 100. In the gallery’s image, a reclining body is described by thin blue lines and uneven washes. Broad areas remain almost empty; darker marks gather beneath the figure and at the left edge. The body seems to emerge from the surrounding paper rather than occupy a fully described room. Exact cover work.

Emin’s loose contour and Smith’s repeated units give the exhibition a useful formal contrast. Both works can be encountered as editions on paper, yet the marks organize attention differently: one leaves passages open, while the other divides the image into a measured system. The selection also includes Rego’s Mermaid Drowning Wendy and Ride a Cock-Horse., bringing explicitly narrative titles into a show that cannot be reduced to conventional portraiture. Its range is a reason to look beyond the word “muses” and attend to each artist’s distinct choices. Complete checklist, final page.

Smith’s 2018 edition belongs to the 2026 show’s historical selection; its inclusion does not constitute a new print release.