Josh Smith: Emo Jungle

a Celebration

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Publication Date: 2020

Text by Bob Nickas

The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith’s radical technicolor paintings.

Josh Smith: Emo Jungle looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.”

A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from Emo Jungle as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

Details

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Artist: Josh Smith

Contributors: Bob Nickas

Publication Date: 2020

ISBN: 9781644230398

Retail: $45 | £35 | €40

Status: Available

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 8 1/2 × 10 1/2 in | 21.6 × 26.7 cm

Pages: 96

Reproductions: 184 color

Artist and Contributors

Josh Smith

Josh Smith (b. 1976) is a New York- and Tennessee-based painter who also works with collage, sculpture, printmaking, and artist’s books. Smith’s work engages in a celebratory and prolific project of experimentation and refinement—upending the conventions of painting while simultaneously commanding a deep awareness of its history.

Bob Nickas

Bob Nickas, a writer and curator based in New York, has organized more than 120 exhibitions since 1984. His books include Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (2014) and four collections of his writings and interviews: Live Free or Die (2000), Theft Is Vision (2007), The Dept. of Corrections (2016), and Komplaint Dept. (2018). Most recently, he has contributed essays to Vija Celmins (2018), Brand New: Art & Commodity in the 1980s (2018), Robert Grosvenor (2020), and Josh Smith: Emo Jungle (David Zwirner Books, 2020).

$45