NEW YORK, NY.- Martos Gallery now represents the Estate of Bob Smith (1944, Springfield, Massachusetts – 1990, Miami, Florida). American artist Bob Smith regularly exhibited in Europe, yet remained in relative obscurity during his lifetime. Though Smith maintained a relationship with figures from the American avant-garde including Gary Indiana, Alice Neel and Larry Rivers, he developed much of his oeuvre in self-imposed exile, spending his early career in Europe and the Middle East before settling in New York and Miami. As a result, Smith developed a singular, esoteric body of work that integrated in granular detail various regional crafts and imagery. Smith’s earliest works were hallucinatory works on paper. Imaginary spaces carved by perspectival lines and populated by the vaguely natural and distinctly surreal, these works were initiated during his time at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston, and further developed on a traveling scholarship to Morocco, Greece and Egypt. He then lived in Madrid for several years, exhibiting his work in Europe, including at the 1973 Paris Biennale. In 1978, as Smith returned to New York, the wildly popular exhibit of King Tutankhamun would arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fetishistic cultural sensation inspired Smith to create the series Egyptomania: a suite of drawings in which Smith maps Egyptian imagery; the hard architectural lines of what was then the Sackler Wing; the New York City skyline; and references to the proliferating media landscape of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Egyptomania, Smith, in his wanderlust, registers the arrival of Tut in New York as a disorienting collision.

In the early 1980s, using the discarded items he had long been collecting from the city streets, Smith began his most signature series: his boxes. Miniaturized worlds which nonetheless evoke expanse, these mysterious environments were orchestrated in found or sourced dresser drawers turned upright. Smith's boxes appear to represent dimly lit hideaways with panoptic views; baroque prosceniums evacuated of an audience; preciously encased memories of exotic trips; and the cavernous outer reaches of the psyche. Occasionally, they are simply compact one liner jokes. Later, Smith returned to Morocco, where he learned the art of wood and silver inlay. With this skill he would create horizontal tableaus that read as games without rules: chess sets recast with characters of Smith’s invention; palatial bocce courts of disorienting scale. His Empire of a Dream series, initiated at the MacDowell residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire and continued over visits to France, brought Smith’s dioramas out of boxes and into open, architectural space, where his last fantastical structures would be created. Smith was diagnosed with HIV and in the late 1980s moved to Miami to make some of his final work, much of which meditated on his condition and end of life. Where the Cure for AIDS Was Discovered, 5 Coral Way, 1988, recalls the Palace of Oz, overrun with calcifying forms, perhaps referring to that allegorical mirage of boundless and promise, maintaining even in illness Smith’s eye for the magical.

Bob Smith was the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellowship in 1986 and 1989. In 1990, he was honored by the Rauschenberg Foundation. Throughout his life, he integrated art and public service, teaching art to senior citizens and neurodivergent adults. Bob Smith’s first exhibition with Martos Gallery will take place in the Fall of 2022.