Josh Smith
25 Jul - 28 Sep 2008
JOSH SMITH
"Hidden Darts"
25.07.08 - 28.09.08
Opening: July 24, 2008–8.00 p.m.
Josh Smith (b. 1976) works through some of the central myths of modern painting in his pictures and installations. His Name Paintings, for example, use his unremarkable name 'Josh Smith' as a motif, reflecting a continual search for a unique signature. What at first appears to be egocentricism, soon appears to be a method or impulse for a continually varying production of images. His collages combine found materials such as posters, newspaper cuttings and maps with his own prints and drawings. Subjective experience and the external world come to be woven together on the surface of the paintings. Smith combines the topos of vitality in painting with a critique of his own means of expression, the eccentrics and self-mythologization of 'bad painting' with the knowledge of art as appropriation and institutional critique, the naïve longing for spontaneity with the mechanical, serial-quality of artistic production. Josh Smith will create a new installation explicitly for the MUMOK-factory.
Curator
Achim Hochdörfer
"Hidden Darts"
25.07.08 - 28.09.08
Opening: July 24, 2008–8.00 p.m.
Josh Smith (b. 1976) works through some of the central myths of modern painting in his pictures and installations. His Name Paintings, for example, use his unremarkable name 'Josh Smith' as a motif, reflecting a continual search for a unique signature. What at first appears to be egocentricism, soon appears to be a method or impulse for a continually varying production of images. His collages combine found materials such as posters, newspaper cuttings and maps with his own prints and drawings. Subjective experience and the external world come to be woven together on the surface of the paintings. Smith combines the topos of vitality in painting with a critique of his own means of expression, the eccentrics and self-mythologization of 'bad painting' with the knowledge of art as appropriation and institutional critique, the naïve longing for spontaneity with the mechanical, serial-quality of artistic production. Josh Smith will create a new installation explicitly for the MUMOK-factory.
Curator
Achim Hochdörfer