I Will Carry The Weight
Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present I Will Carry The Weight, an exhibition by Josh Smith, the artists first London gallery show since 2007.
The American painter Josh Smith, whose practice encompasses prints, drawings, and sculptures, creates works characterised by dramatic brushstrokes, compulsive repetition of subjects, calligraphic lines and the intensity of colour.
In I Will Carry The Weight, the title being the artists answer to Gang Starr’s song Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?, Josh Smith presents a series of new, large and small scale, oil canvases depicting variations of the personification of death: the grim reaper. In each canvas the grim reaper is portrayed with the customary black robe and scythe, positioned in surreal and hallucinatory dark landscapes marked by multi-coloured and vibrant brushstrokes.
The artists commenced the series by drawing cartoon sketches, and slowly started to render the sketches in oil. The weightiness of the subject was for Josh Smith a gift, allowing him to devote more energy to the paintings themselves, giving each painting “enough personality to warrant its existence”. The artist assigns to the paintings titles that he felt nebulously amplified his desire for what each work might convey. About the viewers potential quest for a meaning in the series Josh Smith states “There is no meaning except that they mean everything you want them to. I believe any good painting could just as easily mean nothing as it could mean everything. Ideally you look at the paintings and then think about whatever it is that you end up thinking about. That’s what happens with me”.
The exhibition also includes a group of monotypes, made a few years earlier, portraying the same subject. Josh Smith will usually go into the print shop before he starts to make a new set of paintings and is able to test out everything and see if an idea is worth pursuing. Monotyping produces a unique print, made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The image is then transferred onto a sheet of paper by pressing the two together. In this case, this was done with a printing press. About making the monotypes Josh Smith says, “I feel as if the monotypes are a type of painting. The process of creating a monotype allows for reaction and reflection as you are creating. In this exhibition you will notice the changes between the monotypes and the paintings.”
In both the canvases and the monotypes, Josh Smith creates a series of expressive and colourful memento mori. The inevitability of death is depicted not as an evil or sinister fact, but rather as a harmless reality.
The Artist
Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee.
He lives and works in Brooklyn. Josh Smith is distinguished by his mastery of multiple mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, book, printmaking and ceramic, and his tendency to acknowledge trends in painting and sculpture by expressly upending them. However, he’s primarily known for his paintings.
Typically working in series, his most iconic works are gestural paintings that boldly feature his name as their subject, in which the letters fluctuate between signifiers and abstracted forms. Lately, the name has given way to more figurative motifs such as leaves, fish, skeletons, insects, ghosts, and sunsets.
In selecting these rather arbitrary subjects and rendering them in a manner that is by turns aggressive, playful, repetitive, and oblique, using gloomy colour and broad brushstrokes, Smith compels us to move beyond aesthetics towards a focus on process and looking, inquiring the potentiality of abstraction.
His work is held in many international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.