June 2018
David Zwirner presented a Viewing Room of prints by Josh Smith that emphasize the artist’s ongoing experiments with process and serial imagery.
Smith is a New York–based painter who also works with collage, sculpture, printmaking, and artist books. He first became known in the early 2000s for a series of canvases depicting his own name, a motif that allowed him to experiment freely with abstraction and figuration and the expressive possibilities of painting. His work has since given way to monochromes, gestural abstractions, and varied imagery, including leaves, fish, skeletons, palettes, ghosts, reapers, and palm trees—as demonstrated in the prints. Upending the conventions of painting while simultaneously commanding a deep awareness of its history, Smith’s art is a celebratory and prolific project of experimentation and refinement.
Smith’s work is in many ways defined by the artist’s relentless and multifaceted productivity, which is reflected in particular in his embrace of print media. Each print, monotype, or artist book does not function as an endpoint, but rather as a stage in an ongoing and heterogeneous process of image production, in which motifs and materials are recycled, refined, and reimagined through a variety of processes. The prints presented here, ranging from 2006 to 2015, included lithographs and monotypes, a painterly print technique that involves a unique impression. This selection demonstrated the ways in which Smith’s graphic work employs repetition as a model for investigating and upending recurrent themes. "Each work implies that there are others," Smith writes of his practice. "I try to strip out as much of the content as possible, so the viewer does not have to reach for a meaning. You don’t have to look at one thing and try to get it. The one in front of me is the one I am looking at now."