Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith (b. 1954) uses a broad range of materials to continuously expand and evolve her body of work, which includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. She is best known for her figural representations of mortality, abjection, and sexuality. With a special fascination with the body and bodily fluids, Smith often examines excreta such as blood, semen, and bile in carefully crafted sculptures that bear the influence of Surrealism. “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” Smith has said. The multidisciplinary artist employs tattooing, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and photography, to engage with a range of themes that relate to the human condition.
Kiki Smith (b. 1954) is a world-renowned contemporary artist. She was born in Nuremberg, Germany to artist Tony Smith and actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. In 1955, her family moved to America. Smith studied at Hartford Art School in Connecticut for 18 months, before moving to New York in 1976 where she joined the Collaborative Projects, an artist collective. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the human body, nature, and metaphysical. Since the 1980s, Smith has worked across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, textiles, photography, and installation, creating psychologically charged works that engage with themes of mortality, regeneration, and transformation. Drawing from mythology, folklore, and religious iconography, her practice foregrounds the body as both a physical and symbolic site.
Smith has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions worldwide, including retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2003 and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2005. That same year, to coincide with the Venice Biennale, she presented Homespun Tales at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. In 2008, she debuted Her Home, a site-specific installation with Museum Haus Esters, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, which subsequently toured the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Most recently, she held her first solo exhibition in China at Yi Space.
