Richard Heller Gallery is proud to present Shred, a solo exhibition by Zak Smith. This is Smith’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Maybe you remember Zak from his ambitious project of illustrating each page of Gravity's Rainbow? That is how we know of his work... 


Desire and the world create a terrible frenzy and Zak Smith does nothing about it. His avid eye and hyperkinetic line have always been of the world, not apart from it, and never more so than when depicting his home. Zak Smith’s Los Angeles is a very long and very good nightmare of skies, lights, stained couches, cracked walls, colors, noise, women and trouble.

Shred includes the “Drawings I Did Around The Time I Became A Porn Star”--a sprawling autobiographical series of sketches recording Smith’s days and nights working as “male talent” in the adult film industry in the city with an absorbing visual energy--along with recent paintings and drawings charged with the same intricate, delirious, shameless precision.

About the Artist:

Zak Smith was born in 1976 and has lived in Los Angeles for 8 years. His work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art (where his work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial). Smith’s work has also been exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In addition to his illustrated memoir, “We Did Porn,” two books of his art work have been published: “Pictures of Girls” and “Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.”