He has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, also in London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Valencia, Paris,[1] Dublin, and Havana, among other places.
His two older half-brothers (from his father's first marriage) are both in creative fields in the Netherlands: One, Tijn Smit, played keyboard on the Playcolt song, "Here Comes Maxi.
He then entered the Master of Fine Arts program at Rutgers where he learned of the work of New York performance artist Michael Smith.
(The latter is explained in Jonathan in Purgatory (1999) as a feature titled Sally which ends with David Salle dying during an operation for reconstructive plastic surgery.
[12] The Grossmalerman comics in turn nudged the video work into sitcom form, with more actors, real world settings, and theme music; a line from the latter is "Don't greet the future on bended knees / Or go to Chelsea in faded jeans / Unless they're / From Japan."
Episode 5, also set in the studio, involves male visitors (Mellman and the frontman of New York City's Les Savy Fav Tim Harrington, among others) taking turns hitting on the model.
Another episode had the troubled artist visited by Jean-Michel Basquiat's ghost who only relates some unhealthy career advice while Grossmalerman's model lies unconscious on a table in the background.
In "Studio Visit," for example, the characters spend time looking at a large painting in Alex Katz-like colors of the crotches of several people amusingly and impossibly tangled together.
William Powhida, writing in the Brooklyn Rail in 2004, read the fictional persona as representing "the underlying, uncensored desires and impulses of his audience.
"[24] In the latter song, for example, the band "request[s] your presence in the bathroom / When the music stops," and in "The Artist's Lament," Maxi croons "I want your vagina around the head of my prick.
A Message to mMy Audience, their first full-length effort in 2004[4] in which the TV actress Zoe Lister-Jones (now known for her work on Whitney) appeared, as well as half-brother Tijn Smit, who played keyboard on the song, "Here Comes Maxi.
The cast includes a bevy of Brooklynites: Luis Fernandez as Maxi's stern manager, Christian Viveros-Fauné, art critic and Smit's actual then-gallerist as a member of the Spanish press to hilarious effect, actor Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids and Sons of Anarchy[28]) as a porn actor who suddenly grows some self-dignity in the middle of a shoot and flees.
When Maxi appears at a press conference to give his resignation speech, he accuses his peers for letting commodification ruin their work: "Have we been reduced as people to simply a couple of cheap fetishes?
After revealing his return to theater, future projects, and new interest in dance, Maxi breaks into the song "Please Remember Me," in which he exhorts, "I've got a hard on for a station in your memories" and "I've got a bag of tricks, of images and / melodies/ I'm designed to keep your heart and mind so / ill at ease."
It's as though Smit takes the premise of a mockumentary such as This is Spinal Tap, then gives it the density and even subtle conherence of good contemporary art."
[6] This installation at Roebling Hall's first Manhattan space (above Fanelli's in SoHo) included three videos played on a screen in front of a bed with satin sheets.
Village men, played by the other members of Playcolt, nymphs, and trolls abound, as well as a contemporary homeless man randomly sifting through garbage.
For a solo exhibition at Fred gallery in London, Smit produced about ten videos with simple scenarios that appeared on different-sized screens around the space.
In a third, performance artist Neal Medlyn and actress Zoe Lister-Jones (now known for her work on the TV show Whitney) play two GIs presumably in Iraq or Afghanistan exploring the human wreckage inside a structure they have just bombed.
Jason Cacioppo, the cameraman on all the videos, used many camera moves of 1970s European cinema, like that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder where zooms and pans are used to squeeze as much pathos and meaning out of each scene.
[32] A series of humorous takes on the memento mori, Mountain of Skulls emerged from frustration while Smit was waiting for post-production work on his Grossmalerman videos.
The imagery harks back to the artist's time on a school trip while at the Rietveld Academie, right after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, in a part of Czechoslovakia that is now Slovakia.
He decided to make a town's worth of skulls with individual captions like "Infinitely Reasonable," "Dull But Kind," and "Total Dick," creating an installation of 60 of the small gouache and watercolor paintings on paper for the Pulse Art Fair in Miami Beach.
Smit's gallerist related that the work was "a mediation on vanitas, power, desire, and failure" and noted the installation's popularity with selfie takers.