Once overlooked in the canon-defining Pictures Generation, Philip Smith reclaims his place with Magnetic Fields, a revelatory survey that positions his mystic-infused work as a bold blueprint for art’s metaphysical future.
The Pictures Generation more readily evokes Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince than Philip Smith. Unlike those rockstars, however, Smith’s work appeared alongside four other artists in Douglas Crimp’s movement-birthing 1977 exhibition, Pictures, at Artists Space in New York. Nonetheless, Douglas Eklund omitted Smith from the Met’s 2009 tribute to that show, The Pictures Generation: 1974—1984, igniting a small controversy about how art history gets recorded.
Smith just kept working, exploring, clocking hours at the dojo. Initiated in 2022, his new Energy series marked a culmination, conceptually and critically. Now, vibrant new works in this acclaimed series conclude Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields, the artist’s first-ever survey, which recently opened at North Miami MOCA. Smith has hit his stride, just in time for art’s rush to embrace magic.
The three artworks Smith contributed to the original Pictures show appear near the start of Magnetic Fields, right after the mesmerising jewel-toned grid of eight sizeable swaths of carved wax on linen at the show’s entrance. This tiling of artworks from the 1990s references The Man Who Fell to Earth, the 1976 film in which David Bowie plays an alien attempting to understand humanity by watching eight TVs at once. Each piece in Smith’s take lures viewers in with a chaos of characters culled from his distinctive symbology, spanning DNA strands, protein charts, corporate mascots, and ads for household appliances—all confounding the line between drawing and painting.
Although Smith’s visual lexicon expands and contracts, he reliably draws from the same cache of pre-digital slides. Soon after famed mail artist Ray Johnson started bringing Smith out into New York’s art scene, Andy Warhol advised Smith to tap the public library’s unparalleled image archive. “I had the sense that we were going to be swimming in this ocean of images, and that we would be a visual culture,” Smith told Elephant in Miami, where he grew up and has lived for the past twenty years. By arranging these images into tightly packed compositions, he’s trying to present sheer totality, the Akashic records, all the energies we’ve evolved not to detect because it wasn’t biologically advantageous for human animals so long ago.
Magnetic Fields eschews the stale chronological template for six thematic rooms. You have to go through “Color” again to leave “Pictures,” the section which offers the most unique of the exhibition’s 56 total pieces. These works are drawn rather than carved, and present loose narrative elements. Next, enter an array of Smith’s minimalist “White” works of the nineties and early aughts, followed by his “Black” series of the late eighties—dark carvings with rudimentary, colourful figures resembling archaeological relics. A corridor lined with his “Modern” paintings of the nineties—the densest of the show—leads you to the last room, a frenzy of twenty-five new “Energy” artworks. Here, Smith has achieved that rare feat which everyone wants of their favourite artist: works that are fresh, yet recognizably his.
I first encountered Smith’s work when Miami-based gallery PRIMARY brought his Energy works to NADA New York in 2022. Even amidst an art fair, they stopped me in my tracks. As it turns out, the magic that I felt was real; mysticism runs through Smith’s lineage. His 2008 memoir recounts how his father turned away from practising interior design in the 1960s to become a famed medium and healer.
In a now-redacted TED Talk, former CIA psychic Russel Targ explained that everyone has a sixth sense—it just requires training. Each morning, I pull a random tarot card after meditating and leave it face down. The times I’ve guessed the card correctly, I didn’t see clear images of the High Priestess’s hat or the Eight of Wands’ flying rods. Instead, I hallucinated shapeless masses balancing against each other, and correctly identified Justice. Visions become immediate with the work of really learning to listen, though most people flounder about for years, confusing anxiety for intuition. No wonder—our society thrives on fear.
Erasure—negative space, yin, listening—abounds across Smith’s oeuvre, particularly his eerie White works. By contrast, that action animates Smith’s Energy paintings, a gum eraser blurring his oil pastel drawings into a haze resembling the ether from which intuitions emerge. These dense compositions, too, contain messages. They can teach you to see, or conduct your eye in healing patterns. Smith just hopes they also function like Tibetan Buddhist thangkas, or the night sky—both sites for self-discovery via projection.
Where Smith’s previous works predicted our visual culture, this series foreshadows an energetic paradigm. Art, like society, is embracing metaphysics anew. First published in 1957, André Breton’s Magic Art just got an English translation. vanessa german and Kylie Manning work with healing crystals, while Leiko Ikemura and Guadalape Maravilla sculpt devotional objects. Hilma af Klint is a god. But it wasn’t always like this. Visionary art dealer Jacaber Kastor recently reminded me that psychedelic associations were once risky. Now, though, the market is scared. Art must justify its existence. Magic, at least, can be said to “do” something—as long as you believe that spells actually work, that is
“Art originally grew out of magic—we were all pre-literate societies,” Smith explains. “To convey ideas from other dimensions, that was art’s job. Real art comes from other dimensions.” And yet, the metaphysical can also be co-opted. Nazis took acid. Influencers hawk unethical crystals. Art galleries trim merchandise with magic. “Art became professionalised,” Smith, who’s self-taught, observed. “We lost that intuitive connection with where art comes from.” Smith has met people who own art that they hate. He prides himself on a non-existent auction record. “The paintings have always been alive and they’re a part of people’s lives,” he explained. “They pass them down.”
It’s ironic, then, that his Energy works are just what the market wants. Their pared-back subset of Smith’s typical symbology spans palmistry, sacred geometry, and quantum physics. They’re loose, dreamy, haunting, and increasingly colourful. The Energy works in Magnetic Fields, produced mostly over the past year, are still more vivid than the specimens Smith showed in Stockholm in 2023.
Smith meets this moment from isolation. Moving to Miami severed him from the art world. Now his work expands naturally, according to a higher intelligence, like the way the mango tree in his garden knows when to bloom, and how to advise him, telepathically, to make tea from its leaves. Smith has honed his hearing, as well; now he can transmit, striking with precision, unlike his early days in martial arts, where he’d punch the air wildly. “Even a bad painting, maybe, has a message for you,” he said. “It’s all possible, but I’d like to be at a different level.”
Written by Vittoria Benzine
Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami through October 5, 2025.
