Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Well-known as a sculptor, Kiki Smith has also worked extensively as a printmaker--in fact her printed works and other editioned art, including books and multiples, are arguably as important as her sculpture. Smith emerged in the early 1980s as one of a generation of artists who returned to figurative imagery after a period in which American art had leaned to the abstract and conceptual. In Smith's case the interest in the figure was literal: She is fascinated by the anatomy of the human body, which is an immediate and emotionally powerful presence in much of her work. She is equally concerned with the natural world, and animals have become increasingly important in her recent imagery. The heart of printmaking is the ability to create more than one example of an artwork, and this appeals to Smith's interest in the public dissemination of imagery and information. Her work is politically sensitized but she is also fascinated by craft and is constantly exploring and experimenting with her materials. Her prolific body of printed art incorporates techniques extending from elaborate etchings to crude rubber stamps and images ranging from wall-sized lithographs and deluxe artist's books to screen-printed giveaway posters and removable tattoos. Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Other Things accompanies an exhibition devoted to this underacknowledged but crucial dimension of her art.
Synopsis
Four decades of Kiki Smith's searing, intimate investigations of the body and the cosmos
One of the most influential American artists of her generation, Kiki Smith has spent four decades probing the experience and significance of the body, its knowledge and its limits. "I always think the whole history of the world is in your body," Smith has said. Working on pieces both very small and monumental, using a huge variety of mediums associated with both the fine and decorative arts--bronze, plaster, glass, porcelain, tapestry, paper and wax, to name a few--Smith has remained anchored in her core explorations of the human condition and the natural world.
Kiki Smith is a survey monograph of exceptional breadth, featuring the artist's work from the 1980s to the present day, from her earliest explorations of the physical body, its organs and its fluids, through to her narrative explorations of biblical figures, fairy tales and folklore. Published to accompany a major retrospective at Monnaie de Paris, the artist's first solo show in a French institution, this volume also pays special attention to the position of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, within Smith's personal feminist pantheon. Fully illustrated and beautifully produced, Kiki Smith pays tribute to the artist's urgent, emotionally powerful corpus.
Kiki Smith (born 1954) was first exposed to art by watching and helping her father, pioneering minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This formalist training constituted an important, if visually surprising, source for the work of the largely self-taught artist, who made her name in the 1980s art scene with her visceral sculptures that explored the physicality of the human body.
Synopsis
A unique collection of exceptional breadth brings together almost 100 works by American artist Kiki Smith, from the 1990s to the present day. Text in English and French.