Anatomy is a platform that dissects and narrows in on the various parts of an artist’s practice through the lens of their studio. This presentation provides a glimpse into an artist’s background and process through a multimedia tour including video, audio clips, imagery, and conversations with fellow artists, curators, and other figures who have been influential in shaping and understanding these creators and their works. Anatomy's intent is to examine the myriad of ways in which an artist finds inspiration, merges art and life, and is driven by experience and the people that come into their world. We hope that this look into the lifeblood of the artist’s practice will affect an even deeper reading of the works included and those yet to come.
Working from stream-of-consciousness drawings to acrylic and airbrush, Willie Wayne Smith presents eight chimeric works that reinterpret personal and universal experience through a complex array of art languages that include abstraction, photo-realism, assemblage, and surrealism. Emanating from his atmospheric use of airbrush is a “state fair” aesthetic reminiscent of the visual culture in central Florida where the artist grew up exposed to customized cars, theme parks, and spray pigment t-shirts. Smith’s inclusion of ubiquitous objects—a concrete block, christmas tree, or beer glass—evoke both mundane and ceremonial use, set in landscapes that allude to sublime experience. The paintings call to mind the theological and art historical tradition of presenting the "lowly figure" in a moment of rapture, within a camp aesthetic. Placing a heightened focus on the inclusion of abstract signifiers, Smith aims to explore the possibilities of narrative and traditional value systems of painting through a cosmic lens.
For his newest body of work, Smith cites inspiration from numerous artists including two who are seemingly dissimilar—Renaissance master Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael) and German artist Martin Kippenberger, known for his wide range of styles. At the heart of this particular pairing of influences is the contrast in their approach to painting and beliefs around myths of artistic genius. Sir Joshua Reynolds said of Raphael in his Discourses (1797): “The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters, his judicious contrivance of his composition, correctness of drawing, purity of taste.... Nobody excelled him in that judgment.” Smith looks to Raphael’s The Transfiguration to reinterpret man’s attempt to meet God and in the failed pursuit of these lowly figures, challenges the ideals of this Renaissance masterpiece, which was widely considered the perfect work of art for over 300 years. In the early 20th century, a new generation of artists began to resist Raphael’s artistic authority and considered The Transfiguration repellent—too crowded, dramatic, and artificial. In contrast to Raphael, who thought that art should translate ideals of beauty and faith, Martin Kippenberger insisted that art should connect with the everyday world. No subject was too sacred, nor too trivial, and his work drew on various points of reference—cultural, historical, personal—to convey satiric sentiments regarding the art world and its history. Kippenberger fought against the idea that painting was dead and challenged artistic "good taste" through "unrefined" and audacious works that would become known as his Bad Paintings. Like a number of artists before him, Kippenberger saw his artistic persona as an integral part of his work, but unlike those that created and sustained their own mythologies (Raphael, Picasso, Warhol), he was instead deeply reflective and self-deprecating. In a self portrait from 1988, we see the artist hunched on his seat in white underwear, his swollen belly and drooping shoulders suggesting abdication. A balloon covers his face in shame and self-loathing. Another important influence within Smith’s series is Frank Stella’s Moby Dick works of the 1990s, where abstract elements take on objecthood and suggest narrative play.
“[Martin Kippenberger] was someone who embraced the possibility of art as a limitless space… he was an artist who in many ways gave me the permission to constantly try new things, to embrace the possibility of failure, to understand that failure in itself is another possibility.”
— WILLIE WAYNE SMITH
