Philip Smith

We are pleased to present our second exhibition with american artist Philip Smith at Carling Dalenson Gallery.

Philip Smith was born in 1952 in Miami, Florida. He moved to New York in the 1970s, where he began developing an artistic practice that has now evolved over nearly five decades. After many years in the city, Smith recently returned to Miami, where he continues to live and work. He is represented by Primary Gallery. In 2025, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MoCA) presented Magnetic Fields, a retrospective tracing the development of his work from its inception to the present.

After earning a B.A. from Clark University in 1976, Smith moved to New York City and became part of the city's art scene, interacting with figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Rauschenberg, contributing to Andy Warhol's magazine Interview, and later serving as managing editor at GQ. Smith gained recognition already in 1977 through his participation in Douglas Crimp's landmark Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in New York, alongside Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo. On large, vertical ten-foot rolls of paper, Smith composed fields of disparate images, drawn from found pictures, assembling them into newly configured narratives. This show laid the groundwork for what later became known as the Pictures Generation: a cohort of artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince. Unlike many of his contemporaries who interrogated and deconstructed imagery, Smith was interested in uncovering the sacred within the stillness of the image, a pursuit that has guided his work since.

Drawing and photography have always been central to Smith's practice. In the 1970s he assembled a rich visual archive drawn from his father Lew Smith, a polymath artist and interior designer turned healer, as well as from his own street photography in New York's Lower East Side and found images in the New York Public Library Picture Collection. This archive became the foundation for large-scale drawings and later paintings, forming a pictographic vocabulary that Smith has refined over nearly fifty years. Recurring motifs and techniques, from diagrammatic lines and gestural marks to cosmological, biological, and arcane imagery, create cohesion across a diverse body of work. His early exposure to his father's mystical practices, later recounted in his memoir Walking Through Walls: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2008), continues to inform the symbolic and metaphysical dimensions of his work.

Smith's imagery reflects a spectrum of influences, from childhood encounters with healing and spirits to ancient pictographs, alchemy, astrology, and scientific diagrams. DNA strands, zodiac symbols, Cold War spy manuals, and even household advertisements coexist in his compositions, producing works that are simultaneously intricate and energetically charged. As a young adult, Smith traveled through India and Nepal, observing monks creating Thangkas-paintings of Buddha imbued with specific energies meant to bless, guide, or provide insight to the viewer. These experiences, combined with his father's teachings, shaped Smith's approach to painting as a means not just of representation but of generating energy and communicating beyond the visible world.

Throughout his career, Smith has maintained a deep focus on mark-making and material processes. For many years he has incised images with a screwdriver into a wet mixture of cold wax and oil paint, creating subtle reliefs and textures that interplay with color and light. More recently, he has worked with sticks of pigment mixed with wax, producing line work that radiates energy and vibrancy across the canvas. These methods reflect a continuum of human art-making practices, from ancient stone carvings to pre-literate pictographs, underscoring drawing as a primal and intuitive form of communication.

The latter half of Smith's career is defined by his "Color Paintings," featuring crisp, graphic imagery carved into bold, monochromatic fields, and "White Paintings," where selective erasure evokes tension between disappearance and emergence. Building on these explorations, Smith's most recent series, "Energy Paintings," presents monumental canvases pulsing with gestural and chromatic energy. Much like the earth's magnetic field, generated by molten iron at its core and shielding the planet from harmful solar radiation, Smith's Energy Paintings emit their own magnetism. Lines, symbols, and abstracted forms pulse across the surfaces, drawing viewers into an immersive and transformative experience.

In 2023, Carling Dalenson Gallery showcased a selection of Energy Paintings in the exhibition Fields of Energy, highlighting their dynamic interplay of form, color, and symbolic resonance. The current exhibition, Dream Maps, builds on this trajectory, presenting new horizontal Energy Paintings alongside works from the late 1990s and a selection of prints. Together, these works offer a layered encounter with Smith's spirited and wide-ranging practice.