Product Description
Strippers, internet pin-up girls, ex-girlfriends, fellow artists, and even a few fictional femailes help form the cast of 21-century characters in Zak Smith's Pictures of Girls. According to the catalogue for the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Smith's "stylized portraits and acidic abstractions intimately capture stillness in an ever-encroaching world [with] a deconstructed neo-punk aesthetic conversant in comic book-style drawing, vivid psychedelic coloration, experimental photographic processes, and traditional draftsmanship". The core of this monograph-the artist's first-focuses on Smith's best-known work-his candy colored paintings of female friends. These young faces, depicted with uncanny precision, stare out from the detailed clutter of complex lives in painting that combine wildly disparate aesthetic modes. Photocopy-like photorealism collides with oversaturated expressionism. Jagged graffiti-like lines and a patterned intricacy compete with the horror vacui of Persian miniature painting. Pictures of Girls also samples a wide variety of Smith's large-scale drawing projects, including selections from the ground breaking Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, the experimental 8 Variations, Drawn, Then Painted On, Then Painted, created using hybrids of drawing, painting and photochemistry as well as the tiny, erotic, jewel-colored paintings that make up his most recent project, the decadent and obsessive 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 7 reviews)

excelente!!

llego rapido, en buenas condiciones y sellado. y pues en general el libro es super!! recomiendo este provedor.
September 15, 2008

Amazing work

Smith's style is so detailed and colorful it is almost hypnotic. The rich blacks set the stage for everything that follows. There is an honesty in these paintings that brings the women to life, it feels as though you know them just by looking at their portrait...amazing work.
January 21, 2008

The Work Speaks For Itself

Zak Smith is a brilliant alchemist. For my taste he is one of the first bona fide twenty-first century artists. I collect artbooks, and art when I can scrape the coin together. If I had the money today I would buy an original work by Zak Smith, (that is if there were any available for sale), but in lieu of an original work I bought his book. The full color pages of his art capture some of the excitement I feel whenever I look at his work. His use of color is outrageous especially when combined with the black and white tones of the ink drawing. The book Zak Smith pictures of girls shows off his mad skills, and I only wish it were a bigger book. BUY THIS BOOK!

Victoria Gladstone

March 04, 2006

Essential work by the young American painter

I first saw work by Zak Smith when in New York for the Whitney Biennial in 2004. His illustrations for Gravity's Rainbow were included in the show, and I was stunned not only by the scope of the project but also by the remarkable amount of attention and care that he clearly poured into those pictures.

Having recently purchased the book Pictures of Girls, I must say that I'm as blown away by the work collected in this volume as I was by what I saw at the Whitney. Smith is obviously enamored of his subjects - there's no other way someone could capture so precisely the mood, the sense of place, the idiosyncratic beauty that the artist manages to convey. Stark lines and bright colors provide an arresting framework for the overwhelming degree of intricacy with which Smith infuses his paintings of the "girls." Gorgeous.

I also enjoyed the interview with Smith by curator Shamim Momin included at the beginning of the book - it's a great glimpse into the working methods of such a talented artist, and it will certainly inspire the next generation of artists to pursue their vision with the same unapologetic abandon.

As an avid collector of art books, trust me when I say that if you care even the tiniest bit about the state of contemporary art, Pictures of Girls is a necessary addition to your library. Every time I look through it, I notice something new to like about Smith's work. It's fresh, vivid, infinitely absorbing, and just plain beautiful. Whether you're an occasional museum-goer or a fanatical connoisseur, I honestly believe you will adore this book.
February 23, 2006

Gorgeous complexity

The first thing that I notice about this artwork is its stunning complexity - papers and animals and characters repeating in almost fractal-like patterns. This may sound odd since they are all 'Pictures of Girls" - and the girls are also gorgeous, with bedroom eyes and clothing of varying scantiness. Nevertheless, it's the colors and lines and shading that capture my imagination. Sometimes I am shocked to find that I am staring at pictures of girls in compromising positions with octopuses - so beautiful but yet somehow underscored by a tingle of creepiness. That ambivalent excitement is the mark of true art, in my opinion. This is a great book.
January 16, 2006

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
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Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting
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Elizabeth Peyton
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