JOSH SMITH

Josh Smith's paintings keep on returning to what is common. Or, one can claim, they keep on returning to the relationship between commonality and individuality. Starting with his own name, Josh Smith, and turning what was both his name and a common name into the motif of a series of painting. Offering him an opportunity to focus on the act of painting rather than hesitating about what he should be painting. Testing the range of the motif by continuously repainting, repeating, reshuffling; learning by doing, redoing and undoing and rejoicing the constant shift of shapes, styles and sensibilities. Ever since, Smith has located and lifted common objects from our surroundings: leafs, fish, palm trees. His choice of motives always seem to balance an interest in a typological clarity with an interest in what room for fuzziness that these organic creatures permit. The way their commonality and individuality can be messed up, the way that a room filled with only paintings of the grim reaper has the paintings present in each other while also being in themselves – universal by nature and individual by accident. 

Josh Smith (born 1976, Okinawa), lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Knoxville, Tennessee. He received his education from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

-----