106 MINUTES WITH ...Lucien Smith

He was an up-and-coming art star a decade ago—until he quit his galleries. Now he's ready for his next act.

- BY MADELINE LEUNG COLEMAN

NO ONE WOULD ACCUSE Lucien Smith of being original, least of all Smith himself. “I've always role-played as a painter, role-played as a fine artist,” he says, swiveling in a chair in his studio. “I don’t know how much of it is genuine and how much of it is an act. Maybe the whole thing.” His earliest public role was wunderkind, which he took on in 2011 when he shot out of art school, Supreme beanie askew, and started selling work that flipped at auction for nearly $400,000. His first big sale was a landscape he copied from Winnie-the-Pooh, and his first big series comprised splatter paintings made by spewing paint from a fire extinguisher. Those brain dead Pollocks begged critics to slot him into a trend they called Zombie Formalism, a decorator-friendly aping of mid-century abstraction. Smith, who is affable and casual and now makes airbrushed paintings of celebrities’ faces, welcomes comparisons. As we sit in his tall-windowed, high-ceilinged Chinatown loft, he lists off the artists whose careers he thinks he might have had if he'd kept up his momentum (Rashid Johnson, Jeff Koons, Cecily Brown), the ones whose careers he doesn’t want (Damien Hirst), and the ones he might be channeling (Andy Warhol). “Maybe everything is derivative, you know?” he says with a smile. “Maybe we're all just living the lives of other people.”