CYNTHIA-REEVES Presents South African Artist Lionel Smith at MASS MoCA Museum, July 30

CYNTHIA-REEVES presents new paintings, work on paper, and sculpture by South African artist Lionel Smit at 1315 MASS MoCA Way, the gallery's venue on the MASS MoCA Museum campus. The featured work continues Smit's ongoing exploration into figural work and double imagery. His monumental sculpture, "Morphous", currently on view in Union Square in New York City through April of next year, is a seminal expression of this inquiry.

The exhibition at the gallery's MASS MoCA space showcases Smit's large-scale canvases. These are vibrant, bold works, which demonstrate his free hand in laying down paint, often in broad swaths of clear color. The drips and splatters communicate a certain dynamism and urgency - there is an intensity behind these graceful, calm faces. Smit notes:

The combination of the representation of human form, and the mercurial quality of emotions,translated by color, line and form, is what inspires the imaginative and abstract essence of the work.

Smit was born in 1982 in Pretoria, and now lives and works in Cape Town. He began exhibiting his work straight after art school at Pro Arte Alphen Park. Best known for his contemporary portraiture executed through monumental canvases and sculpture, Smit is highly regarded artist in South Africa, now showing internationally in London, Europe and the United States. Over the past ten years, he has established a substantial international following. His work is included in the collections of the Standard Chartered Bank, the Laurence Graff Art Collection at Graff Delaire wine estate and in other corporate collections, as well as in top private collections in Europe, Asia, South Africa, and the United States. His paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where he received the Viewer's Choice Award. His next museum exhibition will be in Helsinki in September 2016. He was recently honored with a Ministerial Award from the Department of Culture for Visual Art.

Smit's interest in the themes of duality arose organically. He writes:

I wanted to merge the idea of the abstract and the naturalistic form. I love Rorschach images, and so I started doing drawings that incorporated two faces, identical but with different attitudes. It seemed to capture the whole idea of peering into the psyche, of seeing in a different way who we are. My work is very involved with identity and, in the past few years, I predominantly started working with the faces of the Cape Malayan woman, a culture of people that evolved through Colonialism. The image of the double head also has a relationship to Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, that of looking into the future while simultaneously looking into the past.

Lionel Smit, Morphous, (2014), As installed in Union Square Triangle, New York City

Lionel Smit's exhibition at 1315 MASS MoCA Way is on view from 30 July - 25 September 2016. View the Exhibition Catalogue here, and learn more about Lionel Smit on the CYNTHIA-REEVES website.