Kiki Smith

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Kiki Smith, 2013

Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954 in Nuremberg ) is a German- American artist who is mainly known for her work as a sculptor and printmaker .

Life

Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg in 1954 as one of three children of the famous sculptor Tony Smith . Growing up in South Orange , New Jersey , she first came into contact with art in her youth when she helped her father create cardboard models for his sculptures. From 1974 to 1976 she attended the Hartford Art School in Connecticut for 18 months , but did not graduate. Since then she has lived and worked in New York City , where she briefly began training as a paramedic at Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn Interfaith Hospital in 1985 in order to gain better insights into the human body that could be useful in creating her works of art.

Artistic career

In the late 1970s, under the influence of artists such as Louise Bourgeois , Eva Hesse , Nancy Spero and Hannah Wilke , Smith began her artistic work in the artist group Colab , which hosted the Times Square Show in 1980 . Her art - at the beginning mostly screen prints on clothes - from then on focused mainly on the anatomy of the human body. Over the course of her career, she has used a wide range of materials for her sculptures, including bronze, rice paper and glass. She began working with the latter in 1985 at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop . Her art has always been a mirror of social development. At the time of the discovery of HIV and after the death of her sister from AIDS , works such as Game Time (1986) represented a provocation: twelve glasses filled with blood were mounted on a base on which “There are approx. 12 pints of blood in the human body. " Could be read. The subject of abortion was reflected in her bronze sculpture Womb (1986). It shows a swollen uterus that can be opened. However, nothing is presented to the viewer when open. The uterus is empty.

Kiki Smith: Rapture (Bronze), 2001

In the early 1990s, her works had developed into life-size sculptures that mostly depicted the human body in a relentless manner. Her first work of this kind was made of beeswax and was exhibited in the Fawbush Gallery in New York in 1990 : a naked female and male body hang motionlessly apart at a distance of about one meter. Both bodies are covered with red spots and create the image of illness. Breast milk flows from the woman's breast and male semen trickles down the man's leg.

In her works she always turned the inside out by also addressing the “hidden” of the body, such as the body fluids, digestive organs and excrement in her sculptures and installations . Towards the end of the decade, however, a new trend penetrated her artwork. The themes of nature, mammals and fairytale motifs are just as predominant in the more recent works - both in the sculptures and in the pictures; for example in their exhibition All Creatures Great and Small 1998 at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, where the visitor was presented with images of cats and birds as well as motifs such as stars and moons. Her works include a number of self-portraits.

Smith about her work: “The body is our common denominator and the stage for our pleasure and suffering. I want to use it to express who we are, how we live and die. "

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Participation in exhibitions (selection)

Collections (selection)

Several major museums exhibit works of art by Kiki Smith:

Prizes and awards

Others

  • Kiki Smith graced the cover of the art magazine ARTnews in June 1998 .

Literature (selection)

  • Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier (eds.): 50 women artists you should know. Prestel Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , pp. 144-147.
  • Debra N. Mancoff: Women Who Changed Art. Prestel Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7913-4732-5 , pp. 85, 104-105.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kiki Smith's biography at PBS.org
  2. ↑ Kiki Smith's biography at guggenheimcollection.org ( memento of the original from March 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.guggenheimcollection.org
  3. ↑ Weidemann, Larass, Klier: 50 women artists who should be known . Prestel, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , p. 145.
  4. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Living Academicians "S" / Smith, Kiki, NA 2006 ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on July 15, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
  5. ↑ Annual reception for members of the Curia for Science and Art. In: bundespraesident.at. Retrieved October 31, 2019 .

Web links

Commons : Kiki Smith  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Kiki
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sculptor, painter, and installation artist
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg