Miami Survey Celebrates Pictures Generation Painter Philip Smith

Over the past five decades, Philip Smith has developed a fascinating visual vocabulary in painting that beautifully blends art historical and scientific references with imagery from esoteric manuals, household advertisements, and cartoons, resulting in a dynamic body of work that is both mysterious and personal.

The subject of the survey “Magnetic Fields” at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Miami-born, formerly New York and now Miami-based artist is exhibiting around 75 large-scale paintings and photographs created between 1977 and 2025. On view through October 5, 2025, the esoteric exhibition explores the metaphysical beliefs of the poetic artist, whose father was a mystic who communicated with the spirits to guide and heal others.

Although he was one of the pioneering artists featured in the legendary “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space in New York in 1977, Smith’s work doesn’t essentially align with the artists typically associated with the Pictures Generation—such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger, who critiqued the media—but his work clearly reflects the curator’s idea for the show (“representation freed from the tyranny of the represented”) and continues to do so in mystical ways nearly 50 years later.

Anticipating the digital age, Smith took pictures from books, magazines, movies, family photos, and library archives using a handheld analog camera loaded with black-and-white film. He then used the negatives to create storyboards for his large-scale drawings, either by referencing them directly for drawing or by projecting them in slide mounts to trace. With an interest in line drawing that dates back to ancient civilizations, he later used a cold wax process to paint his canvases a solid color, layering them with a mixture of oil paint and wax, and then scratching into the coated layer with a screwdriver to create images, similar to how the Sumerians scored clay tablets. And in his latest work, he uses oil pastel pencils to draw on the canvas and then smudges the line drawing to produce a pulsating, energetic effect.

When asked how his work has changed over the years by MOCA North Miami executive director Chana Sheldon in an interview published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Smith replied, “It has, and it hasn’t. In many ways I just keep making the same painting over and over again, even though they may look different. I’ve created this pictographic language that references the world we inhabit—as well as my experiences with other dimensions. The work appears to change with different techniques and materials, but the fundamental principles remain the same.”

All of the works in the show create an engaging, freeform way of communicating, where the viewer’s perception is scrambled, taking their thoughts elsewhere while encouraging them to piece the visual elements together to form a new narrative. Organized through six series of thematic environments—Pictures, Black, Modern, Color, White, and Energy—the survey charts the progression of his mystical paintings, from the assembly of allover imagery in most of the works to the more reduced fields in the White paintings, when he was deep into Eastern philosophy and removed elements to leave a compelling, pentimento effect, as though he was visually capturing a form of clarifying the mind.

Standouts in the Pictures section include the 1977 pastel on paper painting, Family at War 2, one of a pair of pictures mixing Cold War military manual images with found family snapshots in circular portals floating in a red field. In the Black sector, This Galaxy, a more expressively rendered painting on canvas, created without projection, captures the zeitgeist of the period, when Neo-Expressionism was the dominant style of the day. One of Smith’s early experiments with the wet-on-wet cold wax technique, it features loosely scratched lines and repeated figures and forms on a background of varied colors. Inspired by books on archaeology and the art found in the darkness of Buddhist caves, this series captures the spirit of the gestural artists of that era who were eager to make their mark.

The Modern and Color series return to a more organized, cerebral field of imagery, with the Modern group referencing modernist stylistic themes, such as the geometric division of the canvas, while the Color paintings are monochromatic works that use one color as the background and another complementary color for the line. Smith’s 1995 oil and cold wax painting on linen, Mystery School, depicts a variety of drawn images, including a duck’s head, an aerial view of a maze, ritualistic number beads, and letter blocks, all overlaid with bands of shading that suggest a Barnett Newman painting.

In contrast, his 2001 White series painting, Gaze, created on a collage of magazine pages and layers of drawn and partially removed imagery, shows a blindfolded man looking at a circular device inside a glass bowl, as if he’s receiving a message from it. Gaze and other paintings from this series depict mystical acts of magic, as if they are diagrammatic formulas for achieving a clairvoyant state. Similarly, the Energy paintings portray the transfer of a psychic aura, readied for a reception by the viewer of the artwork. Conveyed through color combinations designed to soothe or activate the mind and spirit, they are rendered with oil pastels and smudged to produce dreamlike imagery, transporting us to another realm, a fourth dimension. As Smith likes to say, “I make the magic carpet and you take it where you want to go.”

Smith’s grouping of the Energy paintings, which traces back to the diptychs and triptychs he displayed in the “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space, enhances their extrasensory potential in “Magnetic Fields.” Full of psychic symbols, when grouped together, they form galaxies that grow more energetically active. The largest group has 14 vertical paintings arranged in a horizontal grid, with blue ones—resembling the skies above—dominating the constellation. Projecting from within rather than being projected onto, drawings of palms, eyes, keys, shoes, stars, comets, suns, moons, spirals, and DNA structures connect us to both the past and present while charting our future.

“Magnetic Fields” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami through October 5, 2025.