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Alexia Smit (b. 1983, Durban, South Africa) is a painter and scholar who lives and works in Cape Town.
Smit is a self-taught painter whose practice emerges from a long engagement with cinematic and media cultures. Formally trained in film theory — with a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow — her turn to painting in her thirties opened a tactile, affective route into questions she had long explored intellectually: the visual construction of femininity, the spectacle of the female body, and the emotional charge of mediated images.
Working primarily in oil paint, Smit works urgently and intuitively on the canvas. Her gestural, emotive surfaces draw from the visual archives that are often cast as frivolous or excessive: reality television, social media reels, soap operas, erotica, melodrama. Working with such fields, she reclaims them as serious aesthetic and affective terrains, anchoring her practice in feminist theory and critical looking.
Her new body of work shifts attention to imagery of women wrestlers from WWE and other sporting archives. She explores the power, weight, and force of athletic women's bodies while attending to their vulnerability and the particularities of performance. Using a process as physical as the subjects themselves, Smit's paintings wrestle with the caught-in-between space between empowerment and objectification, aggression and tenderness, spectacle and selfhood.