Petzel is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Emily Mae Smith, opening September 17, 2026. This marks Smith’s second solo show at the gallery and follows her 2024 survey exhibition at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, where the artist’s work was curated in dialogue with René Magritte’s oeuvre.

In Emily Mae Smith's newest exhibition, hybrid figures and symbolic objects, such as her anthropomorphic broomstick, grapes, eyeballs, or open-mouthed frames, undergo further transformations, taking on forms that are part human, animal, and plant. The figures are trickster-like in their instability, able to defy any fixed identity or easy classification. These new forms function less as metaphors but rather as propositions to resist the framework of gender, class, and labor imposed not only by art historical convention, but also by our present social and political conditions.

Smith’s new paintings turn directly toward the current moment, when living with dignity feels increasingly fraught and connection with one another and the living world seems not only hopeful, but vital to survival. Smith draws inspiration from her immediate surroundings and incorporates the vernacular of historical artworks made in times of similar societal disparity, for example, the agricultural imagery of Jean-François Millet's depictions of peasants laboring during the Industrial Revolution, a motif she has returned to throughout her career.

In “The Locust II,” Smith’s broomstick morphs into a near-human form emerging from straw, the discarded made animate. The figure appears with an avenging presence, inverting the passive nude archetypes of the 19th century painting which inspired it.

Yet Smith’s paintings are not bound to genre or motif. Her understanding and control of the medium allows her to shift fluidly through the lexicons of Pop Art, Symbolism and Surrealist sensibilities. In “Only Human,” a cluster of brightly colored grapes each carries a single eyeball, frantically searching for the gaze of its neighbor, representing the struggle between the individual and the collective.

Built slowly through layered transparent washes and glazes, Smith's paintings achieve luminous surfaces that make the labor of their making inseparable from their meaning. In Smith's sly, subversive visual language, these works ask what it means to hold a self together—or to let it dissolve into something larger—amid questions of power, authoritarianism, and the erosion of individual agency.

 

About Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith was born in 1979 in Austin, Texas. She currently lives and works in Upstate New York. In 2024, the Magritte Museum at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels presented a survey exhibition of Smith’s work alongside Rene Magritte’s paintings. Other institutional solo exhibitions include Pond Society, Shanghai (2023); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Marion Art Gallery, Rockefeller Arts Center, Fredonia (2020); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2019); Le Consortium Museum, Dijon (2018). Select institutional group exhibitions include: Dallas Museum of Art (2026, 2025, 2023); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2025); The Warehouse, Dallas (2025, 2023); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2024); Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2024); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2024); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2022); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles (2022); 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale, Belgrade (2021); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2021); Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland (2020); Public Art Fund, New York (2020).

Smith’s work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; The Consortium Museum, Dijon, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia.