Happy Birthday to Kiki Smith who was born on this day in 1954!
“I think that lots of times (my work) it’s healing—it’s trying to mend, it’s mending—stitching people up. People are flayed open—laid open. Myself, I’m trying to sew myself up….” - Kiki Smith, 1990
“The basic way of making things is similar to how I made things in all my life. I make changes depending on the changes in my life.” - Kiki Smith, 2014
For more than three decades, Kiki Smith has been producing a varied corpus of work including sculptures, printmaking, photography, and installations, constantly exploring human nature and the body, especially as relates to women. “Her investigations of the body—without shying away from taboos, awkwardness, or the boundaries of shame—are an aesthetic discourse on the human condition: they deal with birth, age, dying, wounding and healing, reanimation, sexuality, gender, identity, memory.” (Petra Giloy-Hirtz, p. 11)
Image 1: Photo of Kiki Smith by Erik Madigan Heck
Description: Black and white photo of the artist, showing waist up.
Image 2: “Born”, 2002, Bronze, 99 x 256.5 x 61cm
Description: A naked adult size woman lies on the floor as she came out of a deer with her feet still stuck in the deer’s rear.
Image 3: “Noctua, Corvus, Hydra, Filis”, 2013, Ink on Nepalese paper with mica and methylcellulose glue, dimension variable.
Description: Image of a large snake forms as if its body is a river. Along the body/river, an owl, a bird and a large cat are seen. Papers are crinkled and glued to make a larger size. Some star shapes are added but sparsely. Almost monochromatic drawing with some blue, red, and yellow.
Image 4: Front cover: “Looking up with vein”, 1995, Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 52.7 x 64.1cm
Description: A man’s head is looking up showing his chin with stubble beard and his blue vein as prominent.
Kiki Smith : procession
Petra Giloy-Hirtz; with a foreword by Okwui Enwezor; and contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Virginia Raguin, and Ulrich Wilmes.
Smith, Kiki, 1954-
Munich: Haus der Kunst: Prestel, 2018.
223 pages: illustrations (chiefly color)
English
HOLLIS number: 990152806210203941