Archives

Josh Smith

09.23.11 - 10.16.11
Exhibition — Espace EDF Bazacle

Josh Smith

Happy Fish, 2011

Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Josh Smith

General View, 2011

Photo : Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Josh Smith

General View, 2011

Photo : Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse

 

Josh Smith

General View, 2011

Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Josh Smith
General View, 2011
Photo : Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Josh Smith,

Happy fish, 2011

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Photo: Josh Smith
 

Josh Smith,
Happy Fish, 2011
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre- à Toulouse

Josh Smith

General View

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Josh Smith,
Happy Fish, 2011
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre- à Toulouse

 

Born 1976, lives and works in New York (USA).

 

With their explicit references to the history of painting, “expressive” style, signature effects and absence of a subject, Josh Smith’s works may not seem to belong to any particular period. Smith refuses to uses signs and subjects as a badge of contemporaneity. Like all the artists he refers to, among them Kirchner, Picasso, Haring and Wool, he does not use painting to illustrate a project, but does his thinking “in painting.” The sheer quantity of works that he produces (a phenomenon that he illustrates in his installations) is the sign of this active thought process. For him, a painting is not a closed space of completion, but a stage in an ongoing creative process. The frontier between the original and its reproduction – which already took a battering in the 1960s from the use of silkscreen printing – is eaten away from within by the proliferation of originals. This strategy enables Smith to free himself from a hierarchic system that sorts works into major and minor in order to show the movement of creation itself. In a world of endless flux, of commodities and images, Smith manages to put forward an alternative flux, one that breaks with the repetition of the same.

 

For the Espace EDF-Bazacle he is conceiving a bronze sculpture, Happy Fish, and will be presenting an exhibition of paintings and drawings. Responding to the Picasso curtain in the collection of the Musée les Abattoirs, he is conceiving a series of paintings and drawings to be hung opposite that work.

Co-production : la Fondation EDF Diversiterre et le Printemps de septembre.