num_pages: 144
description: Zak Smith's work moves from sharply rendered poignancy to candy-colored excess. Within a general atmosphere of a dazed freneticism, he offers uncanny and excessive portraits, synthetically luminous abstractions, and somewhat narrative compilations of drawings, which he creates using a unique photo-chemical process. Together, they exist in a world that can't decide whether it's awake or asleep, gorgeous or vaguely psychedelic. Girls figure largely in Smith's universe. According to the Whitney Museum catalogue, "his stylized portraits and acidic abstractions intimately capture stillness in an ever-encroaching world, while demonstrating a deconstructed neo-punk aesthetic conversant in comic book-style drawing, vivid psychedelic coloration, experimental photographic processes, and traditional draftsmanship." Using his friends and his immediate environment as subjects, Smith renders scenes of youthful ambivalence amid a surplus of surrounding diversions and possessions. Smith's works include acrylic portraits based on scenes from his life and images created using experimental photographic techniques. Central to his work is a balance of seemingly disparate aesthetic modes. Using visual elements from painting, drawing, and photography, Smith achieves a hybrid effect that vacillates between sober realism and electrifying abstraction. This is the first monograph of Smith's work.
language: English
title: Pictures of Girls
titlecomplete: Pictures of Girls
genres: Nonfiction, Art
ratings_count: 76
publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers