ART CITIES:Paris-Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing and textiles. Smith became known for her visceral, often disturbing artworks that depict the human body in detail, focusing on themes of women from mythology and folklore, or that reference her Catholic upbringing.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Monnaie de Paris Archive

Bringing together almost 100 works from the 1980s to the present day, Kiki Smith’s first solo exhibition at Monnaie de Paris, is her first in a French public institution. The exhibition covers the major themes of the artist’s oeuvre, including the human body, the female figure and the symbiotic relationship with nature, all of which are recurring motifs. The works reflect the great diversity of Kiki Smith’s practice, and the wide variety of mediums she has explored: bronze, plaster, glass, porcelain, tapestry, paper and wax. The symbolism of Kiki Smith’s art finds its inspiration in her childhood memories (her reading of the fairy tales of Perrault and the Grimm brothers) and the model making she did for her father, the sculptor Tony Smith. The whole of her oeuvre is marked by her fascination with the human body, which she at first represented as separate individual parts with the skin appearing as a fragile frontier between the body and the world. In the mid 1980s, Kiki Smith discovered for herself new and original ways of exploring women’s social, cultural and political roles in society. Subsequently, her work took on a more narrative form. From a feminist standpoint, she appropriated many of the great female biblical figures in order to depict them in a fresh and innovative manner. Within the corpus of her work they sit side by side with heroines from fairy tales or the ambiguous figure of the witch, at the crossroads of a universe of fantasy and popular folklore. From the early 2000s, she became progressively more interested in the great myths of creation and cosmogony brought into being a new chapter of her practice in its own right. Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany, the daughter of sculptor Tony Smith. Brought up in South Orange, New Jersey, she enrolled at Hartford Art School in Connecticut in 1974 but dropped out 18 months later. Settling in New York in 1976, Smith earned her living over the next few years doing odd jobs. Around 1978, she joined Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab), an artists’ collective devoted to making art accessible through exhibitions outside commercial gallery settings. It was during this period that she made her first artworks, monotypes of everyday objects. Virtually self-taught, Smith describes herself as “a thing-maker”. With the death of her father in 1980, Smith turned her attention to themes of mortality and decay, focusing on human corporeality. “Hand in Jar” (1983) consists of a latex hand covered in algae and submerged in a mason jar filled with water. Its clinical realism calls to mind a pathology lab or a dissecting studio. In 1985, propelled by an interest in obtaining practical knowledge about the body, Smith studied to become an emergency medical technician. The impact of this experience on her work was immediate and profound. “Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law” (1985) is a series of nine screenprints and monotypes of deadpan views of various internal organs. Its legalistic title alludes to the artist’s nascent feminist concerns regarding the body, particularly the female body, as a battleground for social and political ideologies. Smith offered similarly clinical treatments of human organs in her sculptures of the period, including “Glass Stomach” (1985), “Untitled (Heart)” (1986) and “Second Choice” (1987), a bowl of castoff lungs, liver, heart, and spleen. Smith’s interest in the human body led to a related cycle of works devoted to bodily fluids, a particularly poignant subject during the AIDS crisis. “Game Time” (1986) consists of twelve blood-filled glass jars stacked on a shelf on which has been stamped “There are approx. 12 pints of blood in the human body”,  “Untitled” (1986) comprises twelve empty glass water-cooler jugs with the names of twelve different secretions generated by the body (pus, vomit, saliva, urine, semen, and so on) engraved on them in Gothic script. In the mid-1980s, as abortion came to the political fore, Smith began a series of works devoted to reproduction and birth. A pair of bronze sculptures represents the male and female urogenital systems: “Uro-Genital System (Male) and “Uro-Genital System (Female)” (both 1986). “Womb” (1986) is a swollen uterus cast in bronze and hinged on one side; when opened, it reveals its emptiness, a metaphor for women’s struggle to control their bodies. Smith’s frank investigation of the body continued in the early 1990s, when she adopted the life-size human figure as her subject. “Untitled” (1990) shows a male and female in beeswax, dangling lifeless from supports, as if crucified. The red blotches on their skin bespeak physical trauma. Milk drips from the woman’s breasts and semen streams down the man’s leg. Smith’s most unsettling sculptures address the alliance between femininity and abjection. “Pee Body” (1992) depicts a nude female figure in wax, crouched on the floor relieving herself, urine trailing behind in the form of yellow beads. She then shifted focus to the animal kingdom, especially birds, whose ferocity and vulnerability echo the human condition. “Jersey Crows” (1995) comprises more than a dozen dead crows cast in bronze, strewn across the gallery floor, Smith’s homage to these victims of pesticide poisoning in her home state. “Rapture” (2002), an etching, aquatint, and drypoint, portrays a female nude, which resembles the artist, being mauled by a lion. Smith’s recent work draws directly from her long-standing interest in dolls and marionettes; the seemingly naive, homespun aesthetic of her sculptures of “Io” (2005) and “Miss May” (2007) allude to the innocence, violence, and anxiety of fairytales.

Info: Curators: Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesapane, with the collaboration of Marie Chênel, Monnaie de Paris, 11 Quai de Conti, Paris, Duration: 18/10/19-8/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 11:00-19:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.monnaiedeparis.fr