Hughie Lee-Smith

Hughie Lee-Smith was a painter whose enigmatic, eerily quiet works explore the feelings of alienation and solitude he experienced as an African American man, while also touching upon the broader issues of social and cultural inequality common to all humanity. Blending the Metaphysical Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico and the cool urban realism of Edward Hopper, Lee-Smith’s work commonly features desolate, sparsely populated cityscapes or other architectural settings with slightly incongruous or unsettling details, creating a palpable atmosphere of unease and foreboding. Figures, when they appear, seem frozen in place, disconnected from their environment and each other, their ethnicity often ambiguous or indeterminate. Lee-Smith’s figures remain in isolation, separate from another, creating a sense of shared experience in which questions of existential isolation are seen to affect everyone, an idea which was fundamental to Lee-Smith’s philosophy.