LIONEL SMIT

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Lionel Smit is a South African artist who operates a remarkable studio just outside of Cape Town wherein he pursues his craft in all manner of media with areas dedicated to sculpture, painting and printmaking.  

Smit and his talented team produce works that blur the boundaries among these media, and installed throughout the large spaces are works from earlier in the artist’s career, as if reminding him where he has been and guiding him into new realms of endeavour. 

Lionel is considered one of South Africa’s most talented artists, best known for his contemporary portraiture executed through monumental canvases and sculptures. 

Perhaps more than anything else, Lionel Smit’s art is defined by a deeply rooted symbiotic relationship between sculpture and painting. 

Today, each of Lionel 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. The blending of techniques across genres is a display of Smit’s work in multiple media, all bearing visible overlap. 

His paintings start with abstract lines and swaths of colour that establish a base for the subsequently overlaid image of a face or bust – in most cases posed by anonymous models from the Cape Malay community. For Smit, the Cape Malay woman epitomises hybrid identity within a South African context, and reflects the disintegrating construction of identity within our increasingly globalised world. His work is loaded with both historical and aesthetic precedent; clearly focused on the dialogue between the figurative and expressive abstract.