Full Name:
Calvin Smith
Country of Origin & Base:
Born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Currently lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic
Mediums Used:
Acrylic, oil paint, mixed media, charcoal, oil sticks on canvas
Artistic Style or Approach:
Neo-expressionist with symbolic figuration, layered composition, and gestural force — driven by personal narrative, emotional contrast, and philosophical questioning.
Artist Statement / Vision:
Calvin Smith’s work reflects the tension between structure and instinct, language and silence, public chaos and private memory. His paintings often feature distorted faces, abstract symbols, and embedded writing — layered together with bold strokes and raw surfaces.
Drawing on lived experience across different cultures and emotional states, Smith’s style captures the fragmented reality of being human: part logic, part feeling, part dream. He paints to express what words can’t reach — a visual vocabulary for thought, sensation, and contradiction.
More than an aesthetic, his work represents a commitment to honesty. A refusal to polish, decorate, or conform. Each canvas is a mental and emotional excavation — sometimes brutal, sometimes poetic, but always authentic.
Education / Background:
Entirely self-taught, Calvin has created work across the Netherlands, UK, Curaçao, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Italy, and the Czech Republic. His creative practice began during his time abroad — where solitude, movement, and cultural immersion shaped the emergence of his visual language.
Exhibition History:
Calvin’s first exhibition took place at just 14 years old, when he was selected for Sterren aan de Maas in Rotterdam — a youth-focused cultural showcase highlighting emerging creative talent in the Netherlands.
Since then, his work has been displayed informally in self-curated events, private showings, and creative gatherings across the UK, Curaçao, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Italy, and the Czech Republic. These viewings often took place in studios, lofts, and underground spaces, drawing in diverse audiences of artists, musicians, travelers, and thinkers.
Rather than follow a traditional gallery path, Calvin’s exhibitions reflect the raw, independent, and experiential nature of his work — where conversation and atmosphere are just as essential as the canvas.
Notable Mentions or Projects:
• Founder of Blackwhitegreyce — an international platform for abstract, expressionist, contemporary art, fashion and creative dialogue
• Paintings in private collections across 8+ countries
CALVIN SMITH – PROFILE
Calvin Smith is a Prague-based artist whose work blends neo-expressionism, abstractionism, figurative distortion, and layered symbolism into an unmistakably personal voice. Bold, chaotic, sometimes confrontational — his paintings are a direct reflection of lived experience: the movement between places, identities, and inner phases of transformation.
Marked by sharp contrast — black and white next to high saturation, aggression beside vulnerability — his art resists easy categorization. Faces are not portraits, but symbols. Text is not narrative, but residue of thought.
As the founder of Blackwhitegreyce, Smith is not just a painter, but a builder of ideas. He envisions art not as an elite object, but as a living experience — one that belongs in public, in dialogue, in everyday life.
He continues to produce new work in Prague, while expanding Blackwhitegreyce as a cultural house for music, fashion, art, cinema and publishing globally.
