IWAN
SMIT
Iwan Smit (Rotterdam, 1989) makes colourful, outspoken work in which mythological creatures and symbols recur. Paintings and spatial objects with a playful tone and a distinctly darker edge.
AVAILABLE ARTWORKs
ABOUT
Iwan Smit (Rotterdam, 1989) studied illustration and fine art at the Willem de Kooning Academy in his own city. Already during that training he discovered that the three-dimensionality he was looking for in his paintings came into its own more fully in spatial objects, a shift that still characterises his practice. Smit moves freely between painting, sculpture and applied work, and refuses to commit to a single discipline.
His visual language is immediately recognisable: colourful, bold and full of energy. Beneath that cheerful surface the work navigates between weighty themes and a certain lightness of touch, resulting in exuberant paintings and objects with a small but distinctly darker edge. Symbols and mythological creatures form a recurring motif, prowling tigers, allegorical figures, saints and fabled beasts that he prises loose from their original context and puts to new use.
This comes together most completely in The Mystical Birth of Rotterdam (2017), a work more than four metres high, commissioned and acquired by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Smit depicts the city as a twenty-first-century multicultural port, but does so in the tradition of late-medieval allegory and symbolism. At its centre stands a madonna as mother earth, pouring the river Maas from her jug; around her appear Erasmus, Zadkine's sculpture of the city without a heart, and a phoenix rising from the ashes, a reference to the bombardment of 1940. Three words are painted in the upper right: Breathe. Walk. Die.
Smit has now worked with Boijmans for close to a decade, including on a free commission inspired by the renovation of the museum building. His work is held in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and the corporate collection of De Correspondent. In Rotterdam, one of his tigers keeps watch over the main entrance of Het Industriegebouw on the Goudsesingel.
Alongside his autonomous work, Smit collaborates with a wide range of brands and organisations, from chocolate studio De Bonte Koe and film producer Warner Bros to Dr. Martens, Red Bull, Jägermeister and Heineken. He made widely discussed work for Lowlands festival and in 2024 designed two Duvel Designer glasses, a series that had previously included Piet Parra, one of his own early idols.