Exceptional Works: Josh Smith

Eye of the Needle, 2025

Oil on linen 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Eye of the Needle (2025) is featured on the occasion of Destiny, an exhibition of new works by Josh Smith at David Zwirner Los Angeles. This large-scale painting continues the artist’s long-running dialogue with the grim reaper. Like the other paintings in this show, this work is clear about its own pleasures: color, form, and a note of absurdity, pushed fearlessly to the surface.

“They are fast paintings, but also dense ones.”

—Josh Smith

Gustave Dore, Death on the Pale Horse, 1865 (detail)

Josh Smith, Friend, 2023

While the figure of death is present in variations across many mythologies and religions, the Grim Reaper as a distinct personification seems to have appeared in Europe during the fourteenth century, as the Black Death decimated the population. During this time, artists began to depict death as a skeletal figure, often with a scythe, although the term “Grim Reaper” likely arose in the nineteenth century.

This figure has appeared in Smith’s oeuvre in countless guises, including paintings and a bronze sculpture debuted at Frieze London in 2023. In the artist’s new canvases, the reaper is riding a bicycle—a portrayal that is at once funny, unsettling, and alive.

As the author and curator Bob Nickas has observed, “In modern times... this once frightening figure has become transformed. Before us is an affable or roguish character who is charming, fun to be around, devil-may-care—as we ourselves may not have been, and thus we are drawn to him.... The gradual humanizing of this figure has accounted equally for our need to disarm the devil’s power and to discover our own.”

Installation view, Josh Smith: Destiny, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2025

In this work, there is a sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Smith allows the composition to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. It is this willingness to keep things open and unsettled that gives Smith’s paintings their energy. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings in this series are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves. Smith uses the bikes almost like scaffolding; wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him a premise to push color and shape across the support. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.

Here, the grim reaper becomes a vehicle for Smith to explore the formal and conceptual terrain that drives him as a painter: tension and release, composition and collapse, figure and ground. The works are graphic and immediate, but also dense, layered, and full of small surprises.

Josh Smith, Eye of the Needle, 2025 (detail)

“I try to make a problem, and the attempt to solve it becomes the art. It’s not important whether I solve it or not. It’s the process that makes the painting.... So, I’m not just executing something, but am gathering knowledge with my paintings.”

—Josh Smith

Installation view, Josh Smith: Destiny, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2025

Smith’s work is held in numerous 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, Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Josh Smith in his studio, New York, 2025

Josh Smith: Destiny