Paul Anthony Smith - New Now New York Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    The Green Gallery, Milwaukee
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Milwaukee, The Green Gallery, Paul Anthony Smith, January 12–April 7, 2018

  • Artist Biography

    Paul Anthony Smith

    Jamaican-American • 1988

    Paul Anthony Smith creates paintings and unique picotages on pigment prints that explore the artist’s autobiography, as well as issues of identity within the African diaspora. Smith employs methods of manipulation as a conceptual strategy for questioning the potential of a photograph to retain and tell the truth of one's past. 

    “From a distance,” as Erica Rawles observed writing for Artforum in September 2018, “Paul Anthony Smith’s ‘picotage’ pieces, 2012–, resemble movie stills interrupted by television static. Up close, they look like pictures dotted with tiny dabs of white paint. Smith creates these small, textured imperfections by carefully picking apart his mounted photographs with a ceramic needle, exposing their white undersides. These sculptural marks form layers of neatly patterned geometric shapes that mask some parts of his photographs, manipulating the pictures’ depths and conveying a sense of movement. Like old-fashioned lenticular billboards that display a different image depending on the viewing angle, Smith’s works require you to shift your position to read the whole picture. Within the gaps of these crafted designs are glimpses of public spaces in Jamaica, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rico where black people are socializing, grieving, and being…. These edits challenge the tendency to assume that a photograph necessarily represents reality while pointing out that there can be unknown complexities and intricacies in the story behind a picture.”

    Referencing both W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and Franz Fanon’s theory of diasporic cultural confusions caused by colonialism, Smith alludes to African rituals, tribal masks, and scarification to obscure and alter his subjects’ faces and skin. Smith employs a similar style of manipulation for his silkscreen series, which sees him collage and reprint pictures. “Both series evoke the nostalgia of found, stained photographs,” writes Erica Rawles, “…they rearrange, invert, and obstruct memory and identity, revealing the malleability and frailness of both.”

    View More Works

166

Untitled

signed, titled and dated "PAUL ANTHONY SMITH 2017 UNTITLED" on the reverse of the mount; further signed and dated "PAUL ANTHONY SMITH 2017 Paul Anthony Smith" on the reverse of the backing board
unique picotage on inkjet print with spray paint mounted to museum board
40 x 26 1/4 in. (101.6 x 66.7 cm)
Executed in 2017.

Estimate
$7,000 - 10,000 

Sold for $16,380

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2022