Lionel Smit

🗿🔳Lionel Smit (born 22 October 1982, Pretoria, South Africa) is a South African artist, known for his contemporary portraiture executed through large canvases and sculptures.

In his expressive paintings, prints, and sculptures, Lionel Smit focuses on the residents of Cape Town, South Africa, in portraits at once representational and abstract. 

Often working at monumental scale, Smit, in his own paintings, combines gestural brushstrokes, dripping and splattered paint, and lush patches of color with a naturalistic rendering of the heads and faces of his many subjects.

His sculptures, too, evince this blend of naturalism and abstraction, with their heavily modeled, sometimes fragmentary, surfaces.

Current exhibitions:

CYNTHIA-REEVES at Art New York 2018, New York, May 3 – 6

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