Since the early 1980s, Kiki Smith has been making works of uncommon beauty and power in a wide array of media that includes sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, video, and installation. Her themes include mortality, the human body, and the lives of women; her subjects, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Mary Magdalene, and the Old Testament figure of Lilith, are often drawn from myth, folklore, and narrative sources. By turns intimate and universal, earthy and fragile, Smith’s art renders the figure in frank terms, expressing its dual aspects of vulnerability and strength.
Early Figurative Art
The daughter of sculptor Tony Smith and the opera singer and actress Jane Smith, Kiki Smith was born in Nuremburg, West Germany, and grew up in New Jersey. In the late 1970s, she decided to pursue a career in art and moved to New York City. There, she joined CoLab, an artists’ collaborative group that organized pop-up shows around the city. Her early work, made during the rapidly developing AIDS crisis, explored the body’s form and functions through its individual parts — flesh was made from delicate handmade papers, and internal organs fashioned from fragile materials such as glass, papier-mâché, terracotta, and plaster.
Sculpture and Printmaking
During the early 1990s, Smith gained widespread attention for her life-size figures of wax and bronze depicting naked female bodies in disturbing, visceral poses. She also began making prints whose images are often based on images of her own face and body. More recently, her subjects have expanded to include animals, the cosmos, and nature; in pieces that merge human and animal features, she has created new mythologies that invite us to reexamine ourselves, our history, and our place in the world.
The Walker began collecting Smith’s work in 1991 and currently holds sixteen works ranging from prints and sculpture to the room installation Kitchen (2005). In 2006, the Walker organized the first retrospective exhibition of her art in all media, Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005, which traveled to museums in San Francisco, Houston, and New York City. Smith was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2012 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
I chose [the human body] as a subject because it is the one form that we all share. It’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with.
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