Kiki Smith is a German-born American modern artist who works in such fields as sculpture, installation, printmaking and drawing. Having as the main subject the human body, Smith’s artworks explore the questions of gender, life, birth, regeneration, spirituality, sexuality and human relationship with nature.
Background
Kiki Smith was born on January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg, Germany where her mother, an opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence was working this time. Smith’s father was a sculptor Tony Smith who represented minimalism.
When Kiki was a one-year-old, the family came back to South Orange, New Jersey, United States where the artist was raised.
From the early childhood, Kiki Smith was surrounded by art. She often helped her father to make paper models of his sculptural compositions in her free time and soon started to explore the beauty of the human body.
Such well-known art personalities, like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Tennessee Williams, and Mark Rothko were frequent visitors of the Smiths’ house.
Despite, Kiki Smith’s grandfather was also related to art – he worked as an altar-carver.
The artist has younger twin sisters named Seton, born in 1955, and Beatrice who chose the artistic journey as well. The first one is a cibachrome photographer, and the latter was an actress, like her mother. In the 1980s, Beatrice died of AIDS.
Education
Kiki Smith studied at the Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, United States. In 1974, she became a student of the Hartford Art School in Connecticut where she had studied for eighteen months till 1975.
The next year, Smith relocated to New York City.
In 1985, Kiki Smith enrolled in the course for emergency medical technicians along with her sister Beatrice. They didn’t finish the training, but Kiki used the knowledge she received in her further wax sculptures and etchings.
In fact, Smith is an autodidact artist mostly due to her not education-focused parents.
Kiki Smith was involved in the professional artistic process after her arriving in New York City in 1976. While in the city, the young artist became a member of the Collaborative Projects, or Colab artistic group which somehow influenced her early creations. The first exhibition where Smith presented her artworks to the public along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring was organized by the association in 1979.
The death of her father in the early 1980s reflected in Kiki’s artworks of the period made with cloth, paper, and ceramics in which she explored the fragility of the human body, the mortality, like in Hand in Jar.
In 1982, Kiki Smith has her debut solo show ‘Life Wants to Live’ held at the Kitchen Gallery in New York City.
The studies of the human organs and body parts the artist had done in 1985 resulted in such works as the series of screenprints and monotypes Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law (1985), the sculptural compositions Glass Stomach (1985), Untitled (Heart) (1986) and Second Choice (1987). As a member of the Colab, Kiki Smith produced a number of the prints reflecting political events of the time or the projects of the group, as well.
Kiki’s twin sister Beatrice died of AIDS in 1988. So, one more theme reflected by the artist became AIDS and bodily fluids what can be seen in the sculptural composition titled Game Time (1986). This period, the artist also touched the topic of women’s rights, the abortion and reproduction problems.
By the 1990s, the entire human figures replaced the body parts in Kiki Smith’s artworks. The female figures by the artist is often made incomplete, disfigured and without skin, like her Mary Magdelene (1994) inspired by the image of these woman in the Southern German sculpture.
The artworks of the decade as well as the earlier once were demonstrated at the group show at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico (1996), Whitney Biennial in New York City (1991, 1993), at the Florence Biennale in Firenze, Italy (1996-1997, 1998) and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999).
It was also a period reach on solo shows held both at the American galleries like the Modern Art Museum, of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1996-97), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1998), Saint Louis Art Museum (1999) and at the museums of other countries, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (1997-98).
The 21th century was marked by the solo exhibition at the International Center for Photography (2001), by one more Whitney Biennial (2002) and three Venice Biennale (2005, 2009. 2017). The first huge retrospective of the artist’s artworks took place at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Five years later, Kiki Smith alongside the architect Deborah Gans worked on the restoration of some elements of the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue located in New York City.
From 2013 till 2014, Smith has worked as an artist in-residence at the University of North Texas Institute for the Advancement of the Arts.
Nowadays, the artist lives and works in New York City. The recent projects of Kiki Smith are related to the portraits of animals and women, landscapes and other artworks inspired by fairy tales and myths.
As Kiki Smith says she is “a cultural Catholic” but not “spiritual person” although she prays every day.
Views
Quotations:
"Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown."
"All you are in the end is what you make. It's what preoccupies you. It takes a long time and it changes, but you follow what is interesting and you just sort of find what works."
"I always think the whole history of the world is in your body."
"My suffering is that I see that there are these really great forms. They're holy in a way, like they have this really incredible power about them. And all I can do is recognize it."
"I grew up in a family with lots of illness. There was a family preoccupation with the body. Also, being Catholic, making things physical, they're obsessed with the body. It seemed to me to be a form that suited me really well-to talk through the body about the way we're here and how we're living."
"As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed - but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn't know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things."
"I've felt free my whole life. I have slightly more knowledge about how to make things or do things now, but I always say you're just following your work. In a certain sense, you're always being challenged to learn and investigate new things or new ways of making things or new technical aspects of things. It's dynamic and always moving and that's what keeps it vital and exciting."
Membership
Collaborative Projects
,
United States
1976
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
2005
Royal Academy of Arts
,
United Kingdom
June 1, 2017
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"This is not a fashionable style; for much of the art world it never has been. And maybe that's why, more and more, her art seems to occupy a universe of its own, a floating world where art, like religion, is both high and low, gross and fine, and always about the only essential things." Holland Cotter, an art critic of New York Times
Connections
Kiki Smith is married to Zoran Skoko, a beekeeper.