About the Work
Although it initially resembles a haunting message from The Shining, this Untitled painting actually speaks of a group exhibition in which artist Josh Smith participated with a group of young, New York-based artists at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon, Portugal. Murder Letters, the ominous name of the exhibition, makes for a particularly striking graphic centerpiece that is both chilling and undeniably intriguing.
Untitled is one of Smith’s announcement paintings, in which he silkscreens his own name and the name and date of art venues where he has previously exhibited, using the text and his anti-art aesthetic to examine the commercialism of the art market and to challenge the rules of artistic convention. Composed using a traditional printmaking technique, yet marked by the artist's hand, the paintings explore, and poke fun at, the issues of authenticity and facsimile that so preoccupy the art world elite.
About the Artist
Josh Smith is an artist whose practice is central to this generation’s discourse on painting. Driven by his early training in printmaking, Smith challenges the romantic mythology of the artist by creating mixed-media compositions that combine the handmade with manufactured and found objects to examine the value of originality versus facsimile. “Painting is like talking for me, Smith says. “It is how I communicate.”
What his paintings often communicate is immediacy, speaking directly to the viewer and forcing interaction. His paintings forgo formal representation and traditional technique in order to explore abstraction and composition. Though he has built a “bad boy” reputation among indie film and fashion types with his seemingly messy looking paintings, collages, book projects, and sculpture, his work is also seen as intensely emotional and sophisticated in the art world and has attracted important collectors and museums.
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