ART-PRESENTATION: Niki de Saint Phalle-Structures for Life

Niki de Saint Phalle was part of the Nouveaux Réalistes group, which she joined in 1964 through her husband, artist Jean Tinguely. She first received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which she had shot using firearms. These evolved into “Nanas,” light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures, first made of wool, yarn, paper-maché and wire scaffoldings and later made of polyester. These voluptuous female figures served to represent the ideal archetype for women in modern society, and can be seen in cities and museums all over the world.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

Highlighting Niki de Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with key social and political issues, the exhibition “Structures for Life” feature sover 200 works created from the mid-1960s until the artist’s death, including sculptures, prints, drawings, jewelry, films, and archival materials. Highlighting Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with key social and political issues, the exhibition focus on works that she created to transform environments, individuals, and society. From the beginning of her career in the 1950s, Saint Phalle pushed against accepted artistic practices, creating work that used assemblage as well as performative and collaborative modes of production. Saint Phalle initially gained attention in the early 1960s with her “Tirs”, paintings produced by firing a gun at plaster reliefs to release pockets of paint, and “Nanas”, brightly colored sculptures of female figures whose sinuous curves would inform much of her work to come. Beginning in the late 1960s, Saint Phalle started producing large-scale sculptures, which led to an expansion of her practice into architectural projects, sculpture gardens, books, prints, films, theater sets, clothing, jewelry, and, famously, her own perfume. Central to the exhibition is an examination of Saint Phalle’s large-scale outdoor sculptures and architectural projects, including “Le rêve de l’oiseau” built for Rainer von Diez between (1968-71); “Golem”, a playground in Jerusalem (1971-72); “Le Dragon de Knokke”, a children’s playhouse in Belgium (1973-75); and “La fontaine Stravinsky” (1983); among others. These are represented in the exhibition by the many models she made in preparation for and in homage to her architectural works, as well as through a wide selection of archival materials, many of which have never before been exhibited. The ideas explored in these works culminated in Saint Phalle’s central life project, “Tarot Garden”, a massive architectural park outside Rome, which she began constructing in the late 1970s and continued to develop alongside key collaborators until her death. Opened to the public in 1998, the garden and its structures, which are based on the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot deck, allow for moments of interaction and reflection that underscore Saint Phalle’s use of art to alter perception. The exhibition includes photographs and drawings of “Tarot Garden” as well as models that Saint Phalle created for its various structures. For Saint Phalle, these structures were charged spaces of imagination from which she envisioned experimental societies emerging, places “where you could have a new kind of life, to just be free”. Saint Phalle also created a series of innovative works that reflect an ethos of collaboration and engagement with the politics of social space. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, Saint Phalle was often at the vanguard in addressing the social and political issues of her time. Her illustrated book, “AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands” (1986), written in collaboration with Dr. Silvio Barandun, worked to destigmatize the disease and was translated into six languages.

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930 by the name Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle. At age 3, her family moved to the United States. She would spend her childhood and adolescence in New York. As a young adult, she embarked on a flourishing modelling career and made covers for Vogue and Life Magazine. At the age of 18, she fled to marry writer Harry Mathews, a childhood friend. The couple moved to Europe in the 1950s to live and work there. They mainly lived in Paris. In 1953, after being hospitalised for a nervous breakdown, Niki de Saint Phalle began painting. This form of therapy would help her overcome the ordeal. It is at this turning point that she decided to become an artist. In 1960, she separated from Harry Mathews to pursue an artistic career, leaving him in care of their two children. She rented a studio on the Impasse Ronsin passageway in Paris, where she would surround herself with other artists including Jean Tinguely, who would become the faithful collaborator she would go on to marry in a second marriage. The only woman in the avant-garde New Realist group, she rubbed shoulders with the big names of the time, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In the mid-1960s, she embarked on the creation of her now iconic works, “Les Nanas”. In 1966, Niki collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvel to develop “Hon” for the Moderna Museet of Stockholm. Her work, a lying monumental “Nana”, occupies the entire exhibition hall. It was at this time that she made her first outdoor sculptures, such as “Le Paradis Fantastique” (with Tinguely) for the Pavillon Français at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal. In the 1970s, she was solicited for many architectural projects around the world. In 1975, on the occasion of an arts festival, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels hung its monumental piece “Last Night I Had a Dream” to its facade. In the mid-1970s, a childhood friend offered Niki de Saint Phalle a plot in Tuscany where she finally realised her dream of creating “Tarot Garden”, a garden of monumental sculptures. Work began in 1980. Over the next ten years, Niki de Saint Phalle would work on the project with the help of friends and colleagues. In 1982, she moved to L’Impératrice, a building shaped like a sphinx that served as a workshop and home. She created a series of clean sculptures called “The Skinnies”, which were regarded as linear drawing-sculptures in space. In 1980, the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major retrospective to her that travelled throughout Europe. In 1982, she worked with Jean Tinguely on the “Stravinsky Fountain” on the esplanade of the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, in homage to the composer Igor Stravinsky. It was at this time that she began to suffer from the first recurrent and disabling attacks of rheumatoid arthritis. In the mid-1990s, she moved to La Jolla (California) for health reasons, but she continued to accept many public commissions worldwide. In 2000, she directed “Queen Califia’s Magical Circle” in Escondido (California). This would be her last major project. Niki passed away in 2002 at the age of 71 in La Jolla (California).

Info: Curator: Ruba Katrib, Assistant Curator: Josephine Graf, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, New York, Duration: 11/3-6/9/2021, Days & Hours: Mon, Thu-Fri & sun 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-20:00 (by advance timed ticket, book here), www.moma.org