Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Shamim Momin (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933045221
• ISBN-13: 978-1933045221
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #188,082 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #78 in

  Books > Arts & Photography > Other Media > Mixed Media

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Totally Amazing Young Artist, January 1, 2006

By	Wallace - See all my reviews

A fantastic group of pictures by an artist that deserves a much bigger audience.
They're all paintings and drawings--this business about a "photochemical process" is clearly a mistake.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous complexity, January 16, 2006

By	S. Bergstresser (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Work Speaks For Itself, March 4, 2006

By	Victoria Gladstone "Victoria Gladstone" (Front Royal, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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