Zak Smith
Zak Smith
February 26 through March 19, 2016
Opening reception: Friday, February 26 from 6 to 8 pm
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Zak Smith. Smith’s work absorbs dozens of ways we see the world--the pixelled eye of jpegged reality, painterly abstraction, the graphic line of illuminated manuscripts and Japanese prints, comics, diagrams and pictograms. With an intricate visual energy, he re-casts this preternaturally absorbing mixture into a seamless whole.
The iconography in this exhibition ranges from abstraction to Smith’s ongoing series of women he knows in the adult film industry. In Smith’s intricately rendered work, reverence and conviction for his subject matter replaces the distancing effect created by irony and mediation. Like the zoo-bound ape that reportedly inspired Nabokov to write Lolita by drawing the bars of his cage, Smith is simply interested in depicting what’s there. What follows are the bright, intoxicating backgrounds and nuanced grays that reach through the picture plane for moments of strange, vibrant clarity and contact.
About The Artist

Zak Smith was born in 1976 and lives in works in Los Angeles. His work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, where his work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has also been exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In addition to his illustrated memoir We Did Porn (Tin House Books), two books of his art work have been published–Pictures of Girls (DAP) and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (Tin House Books). This is his seventh show at Fredericks & Freiser.
Fredericks & Freiser is located at 536 West 24th Street, New York, NY. Our hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For more information, please contact us by phone (212) 633 6555 or email info@fredericksfreisergallery.com, and visit us online at www.fredericksfreisergallery.com, and on Instagram @fredericksandfreiser.