LIONEL SMIT | Irreversible
LIONEL SMIT, Reversible
Oil on linen, 150 x 120 cm (59 x 47 1/8 in.)
Lionel Smit is best known for his contemporary portraiture executed through monumental canvases and sculptures. A multidisciplinary artist, each of Smit’s works offers us an entry point into the variety and richness that lies beneath every face we encounter in life, whether applied in bronze or in paint. While retaining their austerity and meditative aesthetic, Smit’s figures remain highly charged with the emotive and gestural energy of his creative process.
Smit’s paintings begin with abstract lines and swathes of colour that establish a foundation for the subsequently overlaid image of a face or bust – in most cases of anonymous models from the Cape Malay community. For Smit, the Cape Malay woman epitomises hybrid identity within a South African context and reflects the fragmentation of identity within our increasingly globalised world.
Smit’s process as an artist today remains adaptive, inventive, and physically engaging and he has achieved success internationally, from Hong Kong to London and New York. Smit’s painting has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London where it received the Viewer’s Choice Award, as well as selected as the ‘face’ of the BP Portrait Award 2013. In 2016, Smit, in collaboration with Cynthia-Reeves Gallery, installed a public art installation, ‘Morphous’, in New York’s Union Square. He received a Ministerial Award from the South African Department of Culture for Visual Art.
Specialists in contemporary art from South Africa. Established in 1913. South African artists are part of the global conversation. We seek to make their voices heard.