ART! Meet “Morphous”

Internationally renowned South African sculptor Lionel Smit has returned to Providence in the form of “Morphous,” his bronze and steel sculpture now on display in Kennedy Plaza.

The Avenue Concept brought a different one his sculptures, “Colossal Fragment,” to Providence in 2016 for a temporary display at the corner of Empire and Fountain Streets. It was so well-received and fondly remembered that there was interest in adding one his pieces to the permanent collection of public art in the city. In partnership with Mayor Jorge Elorza and the Providence City Council, “Morphous” will now call Providence home.

“Dedicated to the beautifully diverse community of Providence, my home. All the past and all the future meet at this very moment. Care deeply, question all, dream big, and create the new now.”

Lionel Smit

Lionel Smit is one of South Africa’s most prolific and exalted artists. His artistic diversity is pursued through a variety of mediums and he is best known for his contemporary portraiture. His art is defined by a deeply rooted symbiotic relationship between sculpture and painting. Today, each of Lionel Smit’s works offers us an entry point into the variety and richness that lies beneath every face we encounter in life, whether applied in bronze or paint. The blending of techniques across genres is a display of Smit’s work in multiple media, all bearing a visible and tangible overlap. 

Lionel Smit was born in 1982 in Pretoria, South Africa. Smit’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, his painting Kholiswa has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London receiving the Visitors’ Choice – BP Portrait Award 2013. Collections including his works vary from Standard Chartered Bank to Laurence Graff Art Collection and his painting has been featured on the cover of Christie’s Auction Catalogue.

Morphous

Lionel Smit’s MORPHOUS is an exploration of hybrid identity and its ever-changing nature within South Africa’s social landscape. This particular piece evokes a question of time, of past and future, and the balance point at which his country found itself at the time of the sculpture’s creation in 2014, one year after Nelson Mandela’s passing. In 2014, South Africa embarked upon yet another chapter, a post-Apartheid and post-Nelson Mandela South Africa, a future South Africa. This “double-vision” is a foretelling, and an acknowledgement of what has already passed and an anticipation of what is still to come.

The figures are charged with an emotive and gestural energy, a hallmark of Smit’s evocative work. Viewers familiar with Ancient Roman mythology and iconography will undoubtedly think of Janus, the double headed deity of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings.

The end of 2023, the time of the sculpture’s installation here in Providence, is also a time of transition broadly in The United States, and locally here in Rhode Island. It is a powerful message of representation to consider this reference to Janus when depicting a young Black woman.