Hello Hollywood

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Alexis Smith: Hello Hollywood, an exhibition of collages and installations at 545 West 20th Street. Opening on Thursday, May 24, 2018, the exhibition is the first presentation of the artist’s vintage work in a New York gallery in more than 25 years. Eight of the artist’s meticulously crafted, mixed-media narrative collages will be on view, as well as the monumental installations Hello Hollywood (1980) and Isadora (1980). A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the show, with an essay by Anthony Graham.

Composed of thirteen distinct elements, the exhibition summarizes Smith’s search during the 1970s for an American voice through the writings of early twentieth-century authors. Architecturally-scaled wall paintings enhance the mood of many of the collages, including power lines, palm trees, and a train’s locomotive. Isadora, taken from John Dos Passos’ The Big Money, chronicles Isadora Duncan’s loss of innocence and dramatic death by strangulation—infamously, the dancer’s scarf got caught in the wheel of a friend’s Bugatti.

The somewhat sparer Hello Hollywood enshrines the roadside advertisements for Burma Shave that dotted America’s landscape until about fifty years ago. Each of the five wood-framed parallelograms contains one line of a ditty presented much like the sequential signs that characterized the Burma Shave advertisements.

Accompanying the exhibition, there are two recreations of historic window installations in the Schwartz Plaza. One is a re-staging of Autumn Sonata, originally installed in Downtown Los Angeles in 1979; the other, Stairway to the Stars, was originally installed in Graz, Austria in 1979.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Alexis Smith.