Emily Mae Smith used the run-up to Worlds 2026 to push back on the Surrealism label, saying her work belongs closer to fin-de-siècle Symbolism before the opening of Transit of Venus at Petzel in New York. The shift matters because viewers who have followed her through a Surrealist frame now have to read the work through a different set of signs.
Her auction record stands at around $1.6 million, and that market history has helped fix her in the orbit of post-pandemic interest in Surrealism. Smith is trying to narrow the reading instead, separating her paintings from a loose label and placing them nearer Symbolism and the Nabis, where allegory and coded imagery do more of the work than dream logic alone.
Petzel in New York
Smith said, “I was pulling out my paintbrushes and looking at them: this one is sable, this one is badger, this one is squirrel. Beyond being a tool, the tool is made from something in the world.” She was talking about Sacred Conversations, made in 2026, and the line points to how she builds meaning from material facts before she gets to image-making.
That matters in an art market that has spent years rewarding easy labels. Her 2024 exhibition at the Magritte Museum in Brussels already paired her work with masterpieces by Magritte, which strengthened the Surrealism comparison even as it risked flattening the work into a single reference point.
Symbolism and Nabis
Smith said, “Images are not the same thing as paintings,” and that distinction is the sharpest part of her argument. Sacred Conversations gathers animals, plants and artists’ tools within a shallow architectural niche, a structure that reads more like arranged symbols than like a free-floating image bank.
Her point is practical for anyone approaching Transit of Venus: if the paintings are read as Symbolism and not Surrealism, the objects stop functioning as oddities and start acting as carriers of meaning. That leaves the opening at Petzel with a clearer lens and fewer shortcuts, even if the market keeps wanting the faster story.
For readers tracking the exhibition rather than the mythology, the useful move is simple: judge the paintings by how they organize objects, tools and space, not by the old shorthand attached to her name. That is the frame Smith is asking for, and it is the one likely to shape how Transit of Venus lands in New York.
