Josh Smith, »Welcome to America«, 2024

Josh Smith, Welcome to America, 2024
Woodcut on Rolled Okawara paper
76 x 51 cm
Edition of 30 + 5 AP, signed and numbered on front

Josh Smith (*1976, Okinawa, Japan) does it all – sculptural necklaces, ceramics, collages, prints, even a web series. And yet his main preoccupation has always been painting. Swinging from figurative archetypes – palm trees, fish, skeletons, grim reapers – to abstract tangles of color, Smith’s work orbits around the disquiet that arises when individuality meets repetition.
For Spike, he reworked stencils into a woodcut that displays a boyish yet gloomy scenery of stars, bats, ghosts, serpents, and eerie bug-like forms.

“Woodcut has a raw, tactile quality that strips everything down to its essentials – a quality I’ve always been drawn to in painting and printmaking. It feels regal, and also clumsily American.” 

Recent solo exhibitions of his work took place at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna; The Drawing Center, New York (both 2024); David Zwirner, Paris (2023); Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (both 2022). He lives in New York.