Lucien Smith, Onetime Market Darling Who Turned His Focus To Helping Emerging Artists, Has Died at 37

Artist Lucien Smith, who rose quickly to prominence in the early 2010s and later focused on supporting emerging artists, has died at age 37, according to confirmation given to ARTnews by dealer Bill Powers. No cause of death or location was released, and tributes came from figures including artists Joel Mesler and Andrew Kuo, as well as dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Born in 1989, Smith earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 2011, had his first solo show “Good Vibrations” at Half Gallery in 2012, and was profiled by The New York Times T Magazine in 2013; he also appeared on the 2013 and 2014 Forbes “30 Under 30” lists. He became widely known for his “Rain” paintings made by spraying canvases with a fire extinguisher, and his work was later discussed in Walter Robinson’s 2014 Artspace essay on “Zombie Formalism,” which examined speculative market dynamics around reductive abstraction.

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