Catching Shadows. The works include two great wall-mounted bronzes representing women face-on, with multiple arms, like a modern Sybil or prophetess, a video developing the same theme, and a series of photographs where she brings in her sculptures and drawings, and in doing so plays with the many degrees of interpretation.
Kiki Smith has a very personal take on all art techniques including sculpture, drawing, photography, video, etchings, ceramics and applied arts, the notable exception being painting, which she has carefully avoided, maybe because as a field it is too male-dominated. Through these media she continues to explore the body, its organs, and the animal and plants of the surrounding nature.
For this exhibition, her fourth at Galerie Lelong, Smith has focused on the theme of eyes, both human or animal, and on Vision with all the connotations related to it. The works include two great wall-mounted bronzes representing women face-on, with multiple arms, like a modern Sybil or prophetess, a video developing the same theme, and a series of photographs where she brings in her sculptures and drawings, and in doing so plays with the many degrees of interpretation. The bookshop completes this collection with a group of new prints employing varying techniques: etchings, linocuts, digital prints, and more.
Kiki Smith was born in 1954 and lives and works in New York. In recent years, important retrospectives of her work have been organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, the Kunstmuseum in Krefeld and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.
Her works appear in the collections of the world’s leading museums, notably the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Image: © Kiki Smith
Birch Tree I, 2011
17 3/4 x 21 11/16 in
Opening: may 10th
Galerie Lelong
13, rue de Teheran - Paris