Josh Smith

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York

Acquired from the above in 2018 by the present owner

New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Josh Smith, May - June 2018

Printmakers are generally attracted to the multiplicity of editions, and the ability to rework previous motifs from a single matrix, which artist’s like, Josh Smith, have found apt to adapt to more areas of their oeuvre. In the early 2000s, when Smith’s career ascended to the spotlight, he began by experimenting with his name on a canvas, creating varied imagery with one simple concept. While his peers in college worked with trying to develop unconventional or conceptual art, Smith used his name to experiment with form, color and gesture in his painting process. Throughouthis career, the artist has cycled through a variety of themes and motifs ranging from turtles to the grim reaper, until he feels that he has exhausted the subject’s potential. Like Jasper Johns once said about his own prints, Smithaims to “take an object/Do something to it/Do something else to it/[Repeat].”¹ This mentality has allowed him to explore objects or figures that seem simple but can in reality be difficult to represent. 

The present lot, True Fact, comes from Josh Smith’s series of open faced watermelon. While influenced by other mediums like printmaking, Smith also looks to art historical themes, including still lifes of fruit. Fruit has always been a source of inspiration for artists, and Josh Smith modernizes it and experiments with it in this series. Toying with different juxtapositions for the watermelon, he settled on the melon as split in half, writing that , “[he] could not figure out how to make the paintings worthwhile until I showed the fruit opened. There was nothing to render. That was humbling but fun to realize.” True Fact exemplifies Josh Smith’s playful and experimental practice perfectly, an emblem of his oeuvre. 

¹Basualdo, Carlos, and Scott Rothkopf, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021), 280.