Ray Smith  (American, 1959) 

Ray Smith (American, b.1959) is a painter and a sculptor. Born in Brownsville, TX, he grew up in Central Mexico. After studying fresco painting with traditional craftsmen in Mexico, Smith attended art academies in Mexico and the United States. Later, he settled in Mexico City. Often related to Surrealism in his unreal juxtapositions, Smith’s work is also characterized by a unique kind of magical realism. He creates illogical scenarios, that are full of surprises and special effects, by using dogs and animals as anthropomorphic beings. Smith considers an animal to be an “entity of the human figure.”

The artist has held more than 50 exhibitions around the world during the last two decades, mainly in the United States and Mexico, but also in Japan, Europe, and South America. In 1989, he participated in the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Smith exhibited at the First Triennial of Drawings at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, and took part in the group exhibition called Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, which traveled from Seville, Spain, to the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kunsthalle in Cologne, Germany, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Smith’s paintings are among the collections of many institutions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Wurth Museum in Kunzelman, Germany, the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, amongst others. He currently splits his time between New York and Cuernavaca in Mexico.