Greg Parma Smith was born in 1983 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives in New York. He is known for his precise painterly realism, which incorporates elements of academic figuration, representational painting, neo-pop, and appropriation art.
In his work Greg Parma Smith samples the iconography of comics, neoclassical nudes, graffiti, Song Dynasty literati painting, and trompe l’oeil arabesques. As described in MAY No.17, Smith critiques “the way in which subcultures are brought into a dominant domain” by highlighting “exploitative taboos long repressed and smoothed over in so-called high-low narratives in advanced art.”
