Kiki Smith
Works
bronze and silica bronze
200 cm x 200 cm ca.
Ink and colored pencil on Nepalese paper
188 × 257.8 cm
Ink on Nepalese paper with glitter and palladium leaf
234.3 × 295.9 cm
Ink on Nepalese paper with glitter and palladium leaf
234.3 × 295.9 cm
Ink on Nepalese paper with colored pencil
190.5 × 75.6 cm
Blackened bronze
36,2 × 91,4 × 30,5 cm overall with base; sculpture: 35,6 x 76,2 x 12,7 cm; pedestal: 101,6 x 91,4 x 30,5 cm
Blackened bronze
37,5 × 76,2 × 30,5 cm overall with base; sculpture: 36,8 x 56,5 x 7,6 cm; pedestal: 101,6 x 76,2 x 30,5
Hand painted laser cut shina plywood
31,1 × 28,3 × 16,2 cm
Hand painted shina plywood and Japanese colored silver leaf
30,2 × 40,6 × 16,2 cm
Hand painted shina plywood and Japanese colored silver leaf
22,9 × 34,9 × 16,2 cm
Crayon on handmade laid paper
40 × 59,1 cm; 48,8 × 67,5 cm framed
Watercolor and crayon on kitakata paper
44,5 × 50,8 cm; 50,6 × 59,8 × 4,5 cm
Watercolor and crayon on kitakata paper
44,5 × 50,8 cm; 50,6 × 59,8 × 4,5 cm framed
Biography
Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. She lives and works in New York.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2001.
Smith is a New York-based artist and a leading figure in the international art world. The human form, especially the female body, became central to her work in the 1980s. She began to focus on the themes of loss and death through her depiction of the body’s internal components, especially organs, cellular structures and the nervous system. The evacuation of these physiological components from the body presented anxieties surrounding the maternal body and the notion of the body as a receptacle for incorporeal components such as knowledge, belief and storytelling. By exposing its internal structures, Smith portrays the dichotomy between the psychological and physiological spheres of the body. In recent years, Smith’s work has evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Her career, spanning more than three decades, is characterized by great sperimentation with techniques and materials: she employs a wide-range of non-traditional materials ranging from hair and latex to beeswax and gold to a diverse body of media that includes painting, photography, bookmaking, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.
Kiki Smith select solo exhibitions include: Kiki Smith. Woven Worlds, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen (2024); Kiki Smith. Woven Worlds, Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro, Podgorica (2024); Empathy, Diözesanmuseum Freising (2023); Kiki Smith: Free Fall, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Kiki Smith: From the Creek, Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico (2022); Inner Bodies, Fondation Thalie, Brussels (2022); Kiki Smith. Hearing You with My Eyes, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2020); Kiki Smith, Monnaie de Paris, Paris (2019); Kiki Smith: Procession originated at the Haus der Kunst, Munich and traveled to the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland and the Belvedere, Vienna (2018); Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint Etienne (2013); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2009); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005); Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003).
Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as: Biennale d’art contemporain d’Anglet, France (2024); Nian Nian – The Power and Agency of Animal Forms, Deji Art Museum of Jiangsu, Nanjing (2023); Feminine power: the divine to the demonic, The British Museum, London (2022); Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum, Venice Biennale, Complex of the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti Fondamenta Cannaregio, Venice (2019); The Moon – From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk and traveled to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2019); Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now), The Met Breuer, New York (2018); The American Dream: Pop to the Present, British Museum, London and traveled to Fondation Custodia, Paris, France (2018).
Smith’s works are included in numerous prominent museum collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Gallery, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Her work has been included in five Venice Biennales (2019, 2017, 2009, 2005, 1993).
Gallery Exhibitions
Public exhibitions
Press
