Emily Mae Smith – Transit of Venus

An exhibition of new paintings by Emily Mae Smith, marking her second solo show at Petzel Gallery and following her 2024 survey at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. About Petzel is pleased to present Transit of Venus, an exhibition of new paintings by Emily Mae Smith, opening September 17 and running through October 24, 2026, at 520 West 25th Street. 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 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. They are figures that resist, rather than merely illustrate, the framework binding labor to class and gender, not only by 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 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. Smith draws on her immediate surroundings while adopting the vernacular of art made in periods of comparable upheaval, among them the agricultural imagery of Jean-François Millet, whose depictions of peasants laboring during the Industrial Revolution 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, wielding a scythe, arrives with an avenging presence, inverting the passive nude of the nineteenth century painting which inspired it. Where that archetype existed to be looked at, Smith's figure looks back and takes up the blade, a gesture closer to an awakening of conscience than to seduction, the object of the gaze reconstituted as an agent with the power to reap. 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. Read more Toggle Painting