Zak Smith
Fredericks & Freiser will inaugurate our new gallery location at 536 West 24th Street with an exhibition of new works by Zak Smith. For his third exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, Smith will include four abstract paintings, the first seven portraits in his series Girls in the Naked Girl Business, and the large-scale 100 Girls, 100 Octopuses, a painting in 100 parts.
Smith's Girls in the Naked Girl Business are stylized portraits of strippers, go-go girls and fetish models that intimately capture stillness in an ever-encroaching world. His hypnotic and obsessive abstract paintings follow a similar path charting digressions and regressions and variations—examining the DNA of picture-making through a microscopic lens. 100 Girls, 100 Octopuses is decadent, opulent, and lavish. Recalling both the richness of Persian painting and the serial variation of modernism, the work defines the erotic and exotic amid the swirling patterning of skimpy clothing, imaginary interiors and luminous octopus skins.
Zak Smith was born in 1976 and lives and works in New York. His work demonstrates a neo-punk aesthetic conversant in comic book-style drawing, vivid psychedelic coloration, experimental photo process, and traditional draftsmanship. Within a general atmosphere of dazed freneticism, Smithís work focuses on people, places and things (real and imagined) to form an intricate, articulate, and distinctive world that is exquisite for exquisite's sake.
His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work has been exhibited at The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where he was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with his monumental One Picture for Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (now in the collection of the Walker Art Center). This fall, D.A.P. is publishing a full-color monograph of his work with an interview by Shamim Momin. He will also be included in the forthcoming Vitamin D published by Phaidon Press. His most recent solo show was at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis in 2004.