Josh Smith

Josh Smith.JPG

Untitled, 2011

Ocean House

Josh Smith was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1976 and currently lives and works in Pennsylvania and New York.

 He experiments widely and thrives on risk, so his work resists being easily categorized or defined by a signature style. Smith is fundamentally an abstract painter, but he also creates figurative paintings, collages, sculptures, drawings, prints, books, and ceramics. He tends to work with certain motifs in a serial and repetitive manner, continuously investigating and refining his ideas.  His most iconic works are paintings that boldly feature his name as their subject; in recent years, the name has given way to motifs such as leaves, fish, skeletons, insects, ghosts, and sunsets. These rather arbitrary subjects are represented in a manner that is by turns aggressive, playful, repetitive, and oblique.

Solo exhibitions include

  •  The American Dream at The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, CT in 2011

  • Josh Smith at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2009

  • Who Am I at De Hallen Haarlem in 2009

  • Hidden Darts at MUMOK in Vienna in 2008

 Group exhibitions include

  • The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Le Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, ILLUMInations in the 2011 Venice Biennale

  • The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York

  • MoMA’s The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.

 Works appear in

  • Centre Pompidou, Paris

  • MUMOK, Vienna

  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

  • Museum of Modern Art, New York