Greg Parma Smith

Shell, 2025
Graphite on paper
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Framed: 13 x 15 inches (33.02 x 38.1 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Hoffman Donahue Gallery
 

Working across figuration and abstraction, Greg Parma Smith (b. 1983, Cambridge, Massachusetts) combines traditional oil painting with layered imagery drawn from art history and contemporary visual culture. His work positions itself as a post-subculture extension of earlier painters who were attuned to the artificiality of the image, reanimating that concern through a contemporary visual language. As he describes it, his work “seeks to create new spaces in painting that make the synthetic foundation of images more vivid, strange and sensate… putting pictures in a kind of suspension that revels in their constructed nature.”

Parma Smith’s latest series, developed since 2017, explores optical effects that hold the viewer in a state of uncertainty between flatness and depth. Built from repeated geometric forms and subtle tonal shifts, his compositions appear to both recede and advance, hovering at the edge of dimensionality. Though they may resemble digital images, his process is entirely analogue, using a systematic approach to construct volume from discrete units.

Parma Smith received his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2007 and his BA in Visual Arts, magna cum laude, from Columbia University in 2005. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Hoffman Donahue, New York (2026); Museum im Bellpark, Kriens (2025); David Lewis, New York (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2024); the Swiss Consulate, New York (2023); and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Museum im Bellpark, Kriens (2024); MAMCO—Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2024); Basel Social Club, Basel (2022); Petzel, New York (2020); and Le Maximum, Los Angeles (2020).

Parma Smith’s work is in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAMCO—Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; and Museum im Bellpark, Kriens.