Lionel Smit, owner of Lionel Smit Studio in Paardevlei, is celebrating 10 years with the Everard Read CIRCA Gallery by hosting an exhibition at this prestigious gallery in Cape Town.
His latest body of work demonstrates how forms of revelation and systems of exposure bear on the life and the world of the artist. Smit’s exhibition reveals a deep understanding of image creation as a technological enterprise. With the camera serving as a point of connection Smit asks what we expose to the lens and, by implication, to a larger public audience.
Professor Ernst van der Wal from the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University aptly describes Smit’s latest exhibition: “With human figures moving in and out of focus, Smit strategically uses blurred surfaces to speak of our relationship with the world. In some work it seems as if the human is emerging from some otherworldly realm, slowly drifting into focus and definition.”
The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from 8 March to 1 April.
It also offers Smit the opportunity to reflect on the various art traditions that have influenced his own artistic output. At his exhibition one will see extreme abstraction, wild brushwork and vivid colours of the Fauves brought into conversation with subjects harking back to the Classical Art Movement. The result is a dynamic tension between the simplified and the detailed, the raw and the refined.
Smit’s work has been the subject of several international solo exhibitions. His paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London receiving the Visitors’ Choice-BP Portrait Award of 2013. Museum shows include solo exhibitions at MOCA Miami (Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami) and at the Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland
