Dorfman Projects is pleased to present Ray Smith: Exquisite Corpse 2009, a solo exhibition of the artist’s recent paintings on paper. Using the “exquisite corpse” game first used by the Surrealists in the 1920’s, where sections of a figure are completed without knowing what adjoins them, Smith remixes figures from Picasso’s Guernica, taken from Picasso’s preparatory sketches for the painting.

The series Unguernica II was inspired by Smith’s monumental oil painting Unguernica which depicts the distorted reflection of the Guernica tapestry on the United Nations’ floor. Long fascinated with Picasso’s most political masterpiece, which viscerally depicts the horrors of war, Smith became interested in distorting the work when on February 5, 2003 the tapestry was covered with a blue cloth so as not to be visible during U.N. press conferences by Colin Powell and John Negroponte calling for international support of a United States invasion of Iraq. Smith has often used the exquisite corpse technique as a way of exploring subject matter, using the unplanned coincidence of form as a generative and creative operation. “It’s a way of finding a subject by not finding it,” says Smith. Also included in the back gallery are selections from Smith’s series of exquisite corpse drawings, Harajuku, inspired by the wild teenage fashions of the famous Harajuku Station in T