David Zwirner is pleased to present Destiny, an exhibition of new paintings by Josh Smith, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles. For Destiny, Smith has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a figure that has appeared in his work for years in countless guises. In these past depictions, the blank, empty faces and shapeless cloaks of the reapers serve as genderless, formless ciphers for the viewer.
In these new canvases, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the swirl of the city.
In these works, the grim reaper is not just a joke or a dark emblem. He 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.
“There’s a kind of structural pressure that holds everything together, even when the parts seem like they shouldn’t belong in the same image," Smith says. "They are fast paintings, but also dense ones.”
Smith uses the bikes almost like scaffolding. Wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him an excuse to push color and shape across the support. The reapers wear cloaks made from bold strokes of black, but also from sharp hits of high-tone green, violet, or electric orange. These paintings are built out of seemingly contradictory parts: loose but controlled, casual but deliberate, improvised yet tightly bound. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.
There is a real sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Smith allows the work to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves.
Made with this show in mind, the paintings in Destiny are clear about their own pleasures: color, form, and a bit of absurdity, pushed right up to the surface without fear. The result is a series that feels both pointed and off-the-cuff, tough but playful. These are paintings that believe in themselves even as they undercut their own seriousness. They channel the spirit of the New York School—not as a style but as a way of working that values conviction, quick thinking, and the thrill of watching it all come together on the canvas.
