Josh Smith

Josh Smith (b. 1976) lives and works in New York City. He describes his name as being almost a parody on American names because it seems so typical – rather like 'Ola Hansen’ does in Norwegian. But it is precisely by making 'name paintings', by having the letters of his name constitute the main motif, that Christopher Wool’s former assistant has made a name for himself as a painter.

According to the artist, the name 'Josh Smith' rendered in various levels of abstraction – from easily readable to barely identifiable initials, often created expressionistically with dark colours – allows him to focus on formal concerns and to paint without thinking about the motif. The blandness and seemingly endless repetition of the name (he produces several hundred pictures a year) result in an almost meaningless motif and an excellent starting point for concentrating on painting per se. One could argue that a parallel can be drawn to the texts in Richard Prince’s 'joke paintings'.

In addition to name paintings, there are other leitmotifs in Smith’s production: a hopping fish (because he wanted a picture of just this), a leaf (because he found one on the ground and thought it would be easy to paint), and palette paintings or 'brush cleaning paintings'. These latter are canvases Smith uses to clean his paintbrushes with while painting other pictures.

In addition to painting, Smith also produces collages on plywood. He uses a specific format, 121,9 x 91,4 cm. In Rotations #2 we find two of these works hanging side-by-side. They belong to a larger series that was first presented in Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium (2005). Smith chose the format because it is a standard size for plywood, easy to get hold of; it fits into cars and elevators and is light enough for one person to carry. On such boards he glues photographs of his own drawings and paintings (he uses many small-format photos because large ones are expensive to print out). These he places side-by-side to completely cover the wood surface, then combines them with flyers from his own exhibitions and advertisement material he finds on the sidewalk. As a general rule, Smith works on several collages simultaneously. The unfinished ones lie in a stack in his studio. Sometimes they become glued together and must be torn apart. Torn paper thus becomes integral to the visual expression.

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