PRESENTATION:Josh Smith-Mind Child

Josh Smith first gained attention in the early 2000s with a series of paintings of his name, which he later began to unwind to create a series of sharp, colorful, and inscrutable abstract paintings. In recent years, the abstract paintings morphed into more pictorial works of singular subjects such as leaves, fish, skeletons, reapers, and palm trees. These subjects were partially chosen because they can be easily rendered by almost anyone who cares to try. Therefore, the rendering of an image does not over-engage itself with any attempt towards pictorial virtuosity. For Smith, paintings are largely hosts for expression and experimentation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

The truth is that exploring the trajectory of Josh Smith over more than two decades reveals an artist who treats painting not as a static destination, but as an open-ended, breathing field of seriality, repetition, and relentless reinvention. Stepping into the exhibition “Mind Child”, the visitor is immediately enveloped in this charged atmosphere, where Smith’s latest body of work, Destiny (2025), takes center stage. Here, historical pictorial traditions collide with a contemporary visual lexicon, establishing a dialogue that is as existential as it is pop-cultural.

At the core of the “Destiny” series stands the Grim Reaper, that age-old personification of death clutching a scythe, an icon deeply rooted in late medieval agriculture where death symbolically “harvested” human beings like ripe grain. For centuries, this figure has haunted Western art history as a memento mori or a key protagonist in the Dance of Death. Yet, in Smith’s hands, this formidable iconographic tradition is stripped of its solemn historical isolation and thrust straight into the chaotic pulse of the contemporary urban environment. His Grim Reaper rides a bicycle through the avenues of New York, appearing like a casual, everyday apparition. Simultaneously, the figure points toward skate, punk, and tattoo culture, and a wider visual pop culture where death has long since transformed into an icon both familiar and profoundly ambivalent. Moving fluidly between art-historical allegory and contemporary subcultures, the Grim Reaper oscillates between existential symbolism and pop-cultural shorthand—an ambivalence that infuses the canvases with a distinct, magnetic tension.

Many of these paintings originate from photographic studies, which Smith digitally collages into multilayered compositions before committing them to canvas. Yet, the translation is never a passive reproduction. Through aggressive layering, sharp shifts, and visible, expressive brushstrokes, the source images are dynamically re-engineered. Smith’s gestural immediacy nods to the expressive figurative tradition of modernism while remaining entirely anchored in a contemporary visual world. The deliberate ruptures and constant reworking grant each painting a palpable physical presence, uniting conceptual precision with raw gestural energy.

Parallel to the “Destiny” series, the exhibition presents a selection of works from 2024 whose painterly language adopts a distinctly print-like cadence. Stamps and stencils function as active painterly tools, bridging the gap between canvas and Smith’s extensive graphic output. The boundaries between painting and printmaking dissolve; processes of reproduction and repetition become fundamental to the creation of the individual painting. This fertile media exchange spills over into monotypes and oil-on-paper works, where motifs from “Destiny” mingle with recurring signatures like palm trees, demonstrating how Smith allows his pictorial ideas to circulate freely across diverse techniques and supports.

Repetition and seriality have long served as the bedrock of Smith’s artistic practice. From his early name-bearing paintings to ubiquitous subjects like fish, skeletons, and palm trees, certain motifs recur across bodies of work. Crucially, this repetition never hardens into a rigid, recognizable signature style; rather, it forms the engine of an ongoing painterly experiment. Every single canvas constitutes an independent confrontation with motif, color, composition, and gesture. The series thus unfolds not as a sequence of identical doubles, but as an open-ended laboratory where each work tests new possibilities of the medium.

Pushing these investigations further, the “Stage Paintings” extend Smith’s practice directly into architectural space. Here, the canvas integrates into a stage-like setting where image and presentation are inextricably bound. Referencing his long-term engagement with painting his own name, these spatial installations reflect profoundly on authorship, repetition, and identity. A vitrine showcasing jewelry works further highlights the expansive, medium-agnostic freedom of an artist who refuses to be confined to the stretcher bar.

In parallel with Smith’s vibrant presentation, the gallery features a focused selection of works by Dieter Roth. Roth’s process-oriented, all-encompassing artistic philosophy has long served as a vital reference point for Smith. Together, these two bodies of work articulate a shared devotion to art as a living, breathing, and endlessly iterative process—one where the studio is a site of constant transformation.

Photo: Josh Smith, Divines, 2025, Monotype on Somersetpaper, Sheet 57 x 56 cm / 22 1/2 x 22 in, © Josh Smith, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration: 25/9-11/12/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com/