PRESENTATION: Kiki Smith-Woven Worlds

Kiki Smith is one of the most influential feminist artists of her generation. While her early work is characterised by the social debates of the 1980s, such as those about AIDS, she later focused intensively on the female body. In the early 1990s, she began to focus increasingly on the environment and nature as a space worth of protection. The harmony between humans and animals beings as part of a cosmic whole plays a decisive role in her work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

Kiki Smith is an internationally recognised artist with a multifaceted oeuvre that includes four decades: In sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs or textile works, Smith negotiates a world view characterised by cosmic wholeness. The initial point of her artistic work is the space that surrounds her, and the relationships she establishes with people, nature and animals in her living environment. Life, death and transcendental existence, which Kiki Smith negotiates in her pictorial worlds, are united by permeable boundaries. Smith’s art has been linked to feminist themes and concerns from the very beginning. She connects her observations of the female body, of human organs or of animals in landscapes with a parable-like transfer as well as with the material conditionality of their existence, to which she refers in her work through a range of materials: from bronze to precious stones to the finest silver threads. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition “Woven Worlds” comprises over 50 works by Kiki Smith, among them jacquard weavings and their layouts, detail-filled collaged drawings as well as sculptures. Included in this presentation is “Sperm piece” (1991) by the artist, a work from Moderna Museet’s collection that consists of over 700 glass parts spread out across the floor. In this selection of works, Kiki Smith focuses our gaze on nature. Through intimate studies and fabulous fantasies, her weavings are populated by wolves, delicate butterflies, and shadowy bats. In the large-scale tapestries, measuring almost 300 x 200 cm, Smith adds silver thread to create a shimmering world of details. The layouts that the tapestries are based on are almost as large, consisting of collage in several layers, while her sculptures vary in material – from bronze with inlaid gemstones to porcelain with graphite. In “Woven Worlds”, we find an artist who turns her gaze outward – where the relationship between human, animal, and nature stands at the center as a cosmic totality. Kiki Smith is constantly exploring new techniques. The tapestries in the exhibition are created with computerised jacquard looms that make possible a complex color palette through a large number of warp threads. Smith compares machine weaving to printmaking, a way to duplicate motifs and create variations in editions. The exhibition centres on nine of her twelve wall-high tapestries, created between 2011 and 2017. Eagles, wolves, owls, snakes and butterflies appear in Kiki Smith‘s works, whose model is the late medieval tapestry cycle of the Apocalypse in the castle of Angers in France. Smith transformed the impressions she gained there in 1976 into independent murals with a cosmological world view. In those works, humans, animals and nature encounter each other on an equal foo- ting. The large-format jacquard tapestries are accompanied at the Arp Museum by the designs that preceded them and which Kiki Smith realised in prints, drawings and collages. The genesis of her tapestries is presented here for the first time. For the artist, their production with an electronically controlled weaving machine represents an extension of her printing technique and the fundamental possibility of reproducing her works. The characteristic of Kiki Smith‘s work is the metamor- phosis of her images: the transformation of motifs and bodies between media, through which her diverse and fascinating body of work is created.

Photo: Kiki Smith, Sperm piece, 1991 Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet Courtesy PaceWaldenstein, New York

Info: Curator: Elisabeth Millqvist and Jutta Mattern, Moderna Museet Malmö, Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö, Sweeden, Duration: 26/4-12/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Weed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-19:00, www.modernamuseet.se/