Carolein Smit


Carolein Smit is a Dutch ceramic art sculptor whose work often includes animals or skeletons.
Smit was born on 22 October 1960 in Amersfoort. She was educated at the AKV St. Joost in Breda from 1979 to 1984, studying graphics and lithography. She holds her own website where you can see her art works.

Career

Smit is known for figurative "enigmatic sculptures" depicting ceramic animals like dogs, hares or rats. Her sculptures satirically play with the emotions such as hate, love, exuberance, alienation and unresolved emotions, using highly imaginative representations of skeletons, cats or babies. She creates characters with over active sentiment, inspired by themes from classic mythology and biblical tales, such as greed, power and impotence, perishability and death. Her sculptures are rich in symbolism and she often uses elements familiar to vanities, such as skulls, skeletons, small bones of animals. Much like in the 16th and 17th century Dutch Golden Age Vanitas paintings, that were a type of symbolic artwork especially associated with still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands, her work is meant to symbolise temporary presence but with a touch of irony.
Three of Smit's works are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the world's largest museum of the decorative arts.
In 2003, she had a solo exhibition at the :de:Keramion|Keramion, the renowned ceramics museum and center in Frechen, Germany. In 2010, over 60 of her sculptures were on display in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. The exhibition lasted over three months and was the first major retrospective of her work. A review of the exhibition in Beelden Magazine stated that Smit produces "striking ceramic sculptures in which a bizarre baroque figuration results in contemporary, quirky images".