Kiki Smith – Early encouragement from her famous father
Kiki Smith was born on 18 January 1954 in Nuremberg. The daughter of the famous American sculptor Tony Smith - one of the decisive pioneers of Minimalism - she spent her childhood in South Orange, New Jersey. Early on, she assisted her father with the card models for his sculptures and in doing so discovered her own talent for art. The circle around her father included greats of modern art such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Richard Tuttle – Kiki Smith was therefore not lacking in valuable impulses. Having started studying in 1974 at Hartford Art school, she left prematurely and instead moved to New York where she joined the art collective Colab. During this time, she developed a fascination for the human body and its secrets. To deepen her anatomical knowledge, she even took on demanding work in the emergency room of a hospital and underwent training as a paramedic.
Ruthless examination of the human body
In her early work, Kiki Smith was concerned in particular with the urgent questions of the 1980s. Her works examined the rampant AIDS epidemic, to which she had lost her sister, as well as feminist debates around gender and sexuality. Important role models were artists such as Hannah Wilke, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. In 1980, Kiki Smith took part in the sensational Times Square Show; that same year, her father died. Smith’s depictions were sometimes quite drastic, showing twisted human bodies with bodily fluids running down them, or dealing with explosive themes such as abortion or rape. In her fist sculptures she limited herself to individual body parts, but later moved on to shaping the whole body, for which she used materials such as bronze, latex, glass, paper and beeswax. She was particularly interested in the inner processes of the body, in bodily juices and excrements, in the hidden process of digestion; in the true sense of the word, the artist wanted to get under the skin with her art.
Female archetypes, animals and fairytale motifs
In later years, Kiki Smith was interested increasingly in mythological and symbolical motifs, in nature and in animals. A newspaper report about birds falling dead from the sky after contact with a pesticide cloud inspired her to create the installation Untitled (Crows). Brought up a catholic, religious motifs also found their way into her creativity. One sculpture incorporated the non-biblical Jewish tradition of Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam, whilst she admitted to having a great fascination for the Virgin Mary, whom she drew on in various ways. Kiki Smith has received prizes and honours for her art; in 2021, Hilary Clinton awarded her the US State Department Medal of Arts. Her works were shown at Documenta X in Kassel, in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at the Venice Bíennale.
Kiki Smith - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
