Lionel Smit is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on themes of identity and origins, with particular emphasis on the Cape Malay community in South Africa. Smit is best known for his contemporary portraiture executed through monumental canvases and sculptures.

His work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London where it received the Viewer’s Choice Award, and was selected as the ‘face’ of the BP Portrait Award 2013. That same year he received a Ministerial Award from the South African Department of Culture for Visual Art. In 2016 Smit’s monumental bronze Morphous became a public art installation in New York City’s Union Square.

Over the past decade, Smit has established a significant international following and his work is represented in several collections including the Standard Chartered Bank collection and the Laurence Graff collection at Delaire Graff Estate.