Zak Smith
Zak Smith
Maximum Everything Always
May 2 through June 8, 2013
Opening Reception May 2, 6-8pm
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Zak Smith. Smith’s work consolidates influences as wide-ranging as comic-book realism, abstract expressionism, Japanese printmaking, and Persian miniature painting. With an intricate visual energy, he re-casts this preternaturally absorbing mixture into a seamless whole.
The iconography in this exhibition ranges from Samuel Beckett in a green suit to an abstract drawing with futuristic shapes to Smith’s ongoing series of women he knows in the adult film industry. In Smith’s meticulously rendered work, reverence and conviction for his subject matter replaces the distancing effect created by irony and mediation that is all around us. In other words, what you see is what it is. This direct approach endorses a primary, head-on experience, where the space of the painting is closed off to external allusions. This allows for his intoxicatingly bright backgrounds and nuanced grey-scale figures to have a hyper-real clarity that accepts the world as gorgeous and vibrant.
About The Artist
Zak Smith was born in 1976 and lives in works in Los Angeles. His work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, where his work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has also been exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In addition to his illustrated memoir We Did Porn (Tin House Books), two books of his art work have been published–Pictures of Girls (DAP) and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (Tin House Books). This is his sixth show at Fredericks & Freiser.
Fredericks & Freiser is located at 536 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10am to 6pm. Contact us by phone at (212) 633-6555 or fax (212) 633-7372 or visit us at www.fredericksfreisergallery.com