Alexia Smit (b. 1983, Durban, South Africa) is a painter and scholar whose work interrogates the visual constructions of femininity in contemporary media culture. Drawn compulsively to images since childhood, she gathers her reference material from reality television, social media reels, archival footage, and popular film: visual fields that have shaped her understanding of what it means to be a girl or a woman. While her formal training lies in film theory, with a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, she discovered oil painting in her thirties and has since developed a distinctive practice grounded in feminist theory and critical looking.
Smit paints with urgency and emotion, using gestural brushwork and a vivid, often lurid palette to examine the boundaries between spectacle and selfhood. Her work is deeply influenced by visual forms often dismissed as frivolous or excessive — soap operas, reality TV, erotica, and melodrama — reclaiming these modes as serious aesthetic and affective terrains. Painting, for Smit, is both a research method and a personal reckoning: it allows her to explore the tension between being embodied as a woman and consuming women’s bodies through screens and images.
Her recent body of work, inspired by imagery of women wrestlers from WWE and other sporting archives, revels in the force, weight, and power of athletic women’s bodies — while also acknowledging their vulnerability and the complex dynamics of representation. These paintings grapple with the ambivalence of feminine performance: the line between empowerment and objectification, between aggression and tenderness. Her canvases often wrestle with these tensions through a physical painting process that is as intense and visceral as the subject matter itself.
ALEXIA SMIT CV
Email: Alexia.smit@uct.ac.za
Website: Alexiasmit.com
Instagram: @alexia_smit_painting
Tel: (+27) 0726793982
Born:
Durban, South Africa, 1983
Lives and works in Cape Town
Education:
University of Glasgow, PhD, Film and Television Studies 2010
University of Cape Town, MA, Film Studies 2007
University of Cape Town, BA Hons Film and Media production 2005
Training:
Critical Discussion Group under Dr Julia Teale, 2024 - present
Painting Studiowork at Untitled Africa under Douglas Gimberg, 2019 - present
Exhibitions:
2025, What I Talk About when I Talk About Collecting, [group] Beryl Gallery x Oude Leeskamer, Stellenbosch, South Africa
2025, Got Junk Vol 5, [group] The Fourth, via Artsy, International
2025, Art During Chaos, [group] Ladies Drawing Club, International Online exhibition, https://ladiesdrawingclub.com/artduringchaos_exhibition/, United Kingdom/Georgia
2024, Just a Little Slice Please, [group] RK Contemporary, Riebeek Kasteel, South Africa
2024, Got Junk 4th Edition, [group] The Fourth, via Artsy, International
2024, Blurring the Lines, [group] The Fourth, via Artsy, International
2023, The Still Life of Others, [group] Marvol Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa
2023, Got Junk, Goldfingers, [group] The Fourth, online exhibition, South Africa
2022, Spaces Between Us, [group] Alliance Francaise Du Cap, Cape Town, South Africa
Collections:
Beryl Gallery Collection, Lindsay Klein, 42 Frere Street, Cape Town
Press:
Stehr, Michaela, ‘Artists We Love: A Q & A with Alexia Smit’, VISI, 2022
Public engagements/
Presentations
2025, ‘Thinking with Paint’ hosted by the SA-UK SARChI Bilateral Research Chair in Digital Media Sociology and Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town
2024, ‘Painting as a Creative Research Practice’ presented at the CILECT : International Association of Film and Television Schools Conference
2023, ‘Landscapes of Desire’ Tuesday Seminar, Centre For Film and Media Studies UCT