Philip Smith
Magical Thinking

: Munich, Germany

american contemporary art GALLERY is pleased to present Magical Thinking, an exhibition of new works by Philip Smith, created specifically for the gallery’s Munich space.

Bringing together a group of oil-pastel paintings on canvas, the exhibition explores Smith’s distinctive visual language of signs, figures, numbers, diagrams, and fragments of memory. Moving between drawing, writing, and image, these elements form open fields of association rather than fixed narratives.

The title Magical Thinking refers to a heightened relationship between image and meaning—a mode of perception in which symbols are understood as active carriers of association, orientation, and belief. Smith’s work is informed by visual systems ranging from early pictorial notation and the symbolic traditions of ancient Egypt to maps, scientific diagrams, models, and fragments of contemporary life. Rather than employing these sources literally, he transforms them into a pictorial language that is intuitive, contemporary, and continually shifting.

Photography and drawing have remained central to Smith’s practice since the 1970s. Working from an extensive archive of 35mm negatives, he draws upon photographs, diagrams, illustrations, symbols, and found imagery gathered from disparate cultural sources. Earlier paintings were created through layers of oil paint and cold wax, into which Smith incised and repeatedly reworked his images. In the recent paintings, he draws directly onto the canvas in oil pastel, allowing lines and forms to be layered, smudged, partially erased, and reconfigured. Through this process, images emerge, disappear, and return, giving the works their sense of movement and accumulated memory.

The exhibition follows Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2025. Curated by Robin Clark, the museum survey brought together more than fifty paintings and photographs spanning nearly five decades to explore the breadth of Smith’s pictorial language.

Public Collections (selected)

Philip Smith’s work is held in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, among others.

Museum Exhibitions and Biennials (selected)

Smith’s work has been presented in institutional contexts including Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2025), as well as the Whitney Biennial and the Beijing International Art Biennale. His work was also included in Douglas Crimp’s influential exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, New York, in 1977.