South African artist Lionel Smit’s large bronze sculpture is to be installed in New York’s Union Square in mid-June, and is to remain there for 10 months. It will be in the square, at an important and historic Manhattan intersection.
The sculpture, Morphous, is one of a set of four, with one bought by English jeweller Laurence Graff for the Delaire-Graff wine estate in the Stellenbosch area, another in a private South African collection and the third “still in casting”.
Born in Pretoria in 1982, Smit started exhibiting straight after art school. He now lives and works in Cape Town. One of the Morphous sculptures was exhibited in Johannesburg at the Circa Gallery in Rosebank in 2014.
The public installation will be complemented with an exhibition of Smit’s work at the Cynthia-Reeves gallery on the campus of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts in July and August 2016.