PRESS RELEASE
LIONEL SMIT: Exposure
Mar 8 – Apr 1, 2023
Everard Read is pleased to present Exposure by Lionel Smit. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from 8 March to 1 April 2023. Celebrating 10 years with Everard Read, Lionel Smit’s latest body of work demonstrates how forms of revelation and systems of exposure bear on the life and the world of the artist.
The collection of painting, sculpture and film 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.
This exhibition also offers Smit the opportunity to reflect on the various art traditions that have influenced his own artistic output. We see the extreme abstraction, wild brushwork and vivid colours of the 20th century Fauves brought into conversation with subjects harking back to the Classical art movement of the Renaissance. The result is a dynamic tension between the simplified and the detailed, the raw and the refined. “With human figures moving in and out of focus, Smit strategically uses blurred surfaces to speak of our relation to the world. In some work, it seems as if the human is emerging from some otherworldly realm, slowly drifting into focus and definition,” comments Ernst van der Wal (professor of Visual Studies at the US).
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LIONEL SMIT
(b.1982 Pretoria, South Africa)
Lionel Smit’s artistic diversity is pursued through a variety of mediums, and he is best known for his contemporary portraiture. Smit’s work has been the subject of several international solo exhibitions. His painting has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London receiving the Visitors' Choice Award at the BP Portrait Award 2013. Museum shows include solo exhibitions at MOCA Miami (Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami) and at the Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland. He is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Installation images by Michael Hall
