Transit of Venus

Petzel Gallery presents the exhibition "Transit of Venus", a show of new paintings by Emily Mae Smith at its space at 520 West 25th Street. It is Smith's second solo exhibition at the gallery and follows her 2024 survey at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. Her hybrid figures and symbolic objects, among them her anthropomorphic broomstick, grapes, eyeballs and open-mouthed frames, take on forms that are part human, animal and plant, trickster-like figures that resist fixed identity and the frameworks binding labor to class and gender. Built through layered transparent washes and glazes, the paintings draw on her surroundings and on the vernacular of art made in periods of upheaval, such as the agricultural imagery of Jean-François Millet, while its title alludes to the astronomical phenomenon, the female body in painting and the goddess Venus.