SMITH — Ici grand ouvert — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Starts tomorrow: May 23, 2026 → January 30, 2027

The Slash Editorial Team’s Take:

The Mac Val presents a solo exhibition by Smith, who has been shaping the French art scene for the past fifteen years through work that makes light and bodies pulse to the rhythm of reflections and dreams, ultimately dissolving boundaries. Terribly intelligent and possessed of extraordinary visual power, she subverts the codes of the retrospective to invent a magnetic ecosystem of temporalities in which the works contaminate and collide with one another, offering a synthetic substratum that sketches a negative portrait of the artist. Vertiginously intimate in its excess and resolutely open to interpretation and the unconditional sharing of experience, Ici grand ouvert asserts itself as one of the major exhibitions of the year. G.B.

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An artist-researcher, SMITH (born 1985) navigates between photography, moving images, installation, sculpture and performance. His work develops in open cycles, often starting with photographs. Shrugging off chronology, he shifts the boundaries of portraiture and landscape, opening up a space where the human, animal, plant, mineral and celestial realms intertwine. His work is informed by a poetics of metamorphosis which overflows the realm of the real, traverses in-between spaces, and inhabits thresholds rather than certainties. Forms slide, identities shift, bodies transform, perception shifts gears. From fluctuating states of consciousness, between trance and psychedelia, SMITH weaves a network of correspondences between bodily and cognitive practices and experimental scientific and technological devices, in search of a point of contact where spirituality, sensitivity and technology can finally recompose together.

At MAC VAL, the artist’s works have featured in the group shows “Lignes de vies — une exposition de légendes” (Lifelines — an Exhibition of Legends) in 2019 and “Histoires vraies” (“True Stories”) in 2023.

This exhibition has been designed in collaboration with architects and designers Matthieu Prat (Diplomates) and Sami Rintala, assisted by Toni Lozano. The monograph “Ici grand ouvert” brings together old and new works in a sweeping movement that reveals the artist’s output in the light of his present and future inquiries.

Exhibition organised with the collaboration and support of Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. With the support of Studio Superpartners

This project has been awarded the Bicentennial of Photography label by the Ministry of Culture and is part of the official Bicentennial program from September 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027.