EMILY MAE SMITH: TRANSIT OF VENUS
Transit of Venus, 2026
Petzel is pleased to present Transit of Venus, an exhibition of new paintings by Emily Mae Smith.
September 17 — October 24, 2026
In Transit of Venus, Smith’s hybrid figures and symbolic objects—including her anthropomorphic broomstick, grapes, eyeballs, and open-mouthed frames—undergo further transformations, taking on forms that are part human, animal, and plant. These new forms are trickster-like in their instability, able to defy any fixed identity or easy classification, functioning less as metaphors but rather as propositions.
Smith’s new paintings turn directly toward the current moment, when living with dignity feels increasingly fraught and connection to one another and to the living world feels vital to survival. The exhibition’s title, Transit of Venus, is multivalent, simultaneously alluding to the astronomical phenomena, representations of the female body in painting, as well as mythology, in which Venus the Goddess of Love, becomes a symbol of connection and the creative forces of nature.
Straw Woman Problem, 2026
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. The painting presses on ocularcentrism—the Western habit of treating sight as the primary route to knowledge and worth—and the idea that we are shaped as much by being looked at as by looking. Together yet apart, the grapes portray how selfhood is negotiated through a gaze it cannot escape.
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 her 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.