Chicago, IL
June 11-14, 2026
f
U-Haul Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition in Chicago, Buzz Smith: Perfect Grey, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by the Brooklyn based artist. From June 11-14, the gallery will present a new body of work that continues Smith's prodding at the porous boundary between artwork and product.
Growing up on the outskirts of Chicago, Smith developed an artistic language informed by driving through the suburbs’ side streets and winding highways. Advertising is ubiquitous, assuming an identity equal parts corporate communicator and way-finding landmark. Memories are overlaid with Bryan Urlacher’s Restore Hair billboards on the Eisenhower, Mickey’s Gyro & Ribs sign off Harlem Avenue, and Berwyn’s teal Cermak Plaza plaque rising high above the parking lot where shoppers hop from Best-Buy to Ross’s to Shoe Carnival, flashing their logos as status symbols. Driving past triggers specific memories formed within the presence of these corporate monoliths.
Smith’s drawings relay this interplay between logo and memory. By “collaging” them together, he recalls the history of both early-20th century advertisements and late-20th century “ad art”, where artists, such as Linda Benglis and Ed Ruscha, among others, printed, cheeky ads in Artforum as a form of artistic rebranding and self-fashioning, selling their new image to garner attention from art viewers.
Smith is selling his associations and re-defining corporate iconography with a particular midwestern sensibility. Popular Woodworking x Testing for Sharp, pairs a drawn rendition of the “Popular Woodworking” magazine logo with an image of a nude torso using a hand plane blade to shave pubic hair. The connection between tool and logo is evident, and the tongue-and-cheek reference to ‘wood’ embodies an unpretentious ethos that permeates across Smith’s series of colored pencil drawings. His choice of medium brings a familiarity and warmth to each drawing that is felt from the works of David Hockney to the pictures that make it onto your Mom’s fridge.
At the center of the exhibition is a large, functioning speaker system. The audio components— Altec horns and woofers paired with a McIntosh 275 stereo tube amplifier—were commercially manufactured. They are housed in white oak cabinets with lovingly cut dovetail joints, painted with grey milk paint. In this instance, the vintage audio components function as the brand logos in the colored pencil drawings; the cabinetry, like the background images of the drawings, tell a specific story of Smith’s devotion to his craft and the care inherent in cutting all that wood.
- Katie Svensson