October 18, 2019 - February 9, 2020

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith

Solo show, Monnaie de Paris, France

Monnaie de Paris is proud to present the first solo show of the American artist Kiki Smith by a French public institution. This unique collection of exceptional breadth will bring together almost one hundred works from the 1980s to the present day. The exhibition will cover the major themes of the artist’s oeuvre, including the human body, the female figure and the symbiotic relationship with nature, all of which are recurring motifs. The works to be presented at the Monnaie de Paris will reflect the great diversity of Kiki Smith’s practice, and the wide variety of media she has explored: bronze, plaster, glass, porcelain, tapestry, paper and wax.

The symbolism of Kiki Smith’s art finds its inspiration in her childhood memories – her reading of the fairy tales of Perrault and the Grimm brothers – and the model making she did for her father, the sculptor Tony Smith. The whole of her oeuvre is marked by her fascination with the human body, which she at first represented as separate individual parts with the skin appearing as a fragile frontier between the body and the world. In the mid 1980s, Kiki Smith discovered for herself new and original ways of exploring women’s social, cultural and political roles in society.

Subsequently, her work took on a more narrative form. From a feminist standpoint, she appropriated many of the great female biblical figures in order to depict them in a fresh and innovative manner. Within the corpus of her work they sit side by side with heroines from fairy tales or the ambiguous figure of the witch, at the crossroads of a universe of fantasy and popular folklore.

The symbolism of Kiki Smith’s art finds its inspiration in her childhood memories – her reading of the fairy tales of Perrault and the Grimm brothers – and the model making she did for her father, the sculptor Tony Smith. The whole of her oeuvre is marked by her fascination with the human body, which she at first represented as separate individual parts with the skin appearing as a fragile frontier between the body and the world. In the mid 1980s, Kiki Smith discovered for herself new and original ways of exploring women’s social, cultural and political roles in society.

Subsequently, her work took on a more narrative form. From a feminist standpoint, she appropriated many of the great female biblical figures in order to depict them in a fresh and innovative manner. Within the corpus of her work they sit side by side with heroines from fairy tales or the ambiguous figure of the witch, at the crossroads of a universe of fantasy and popular folklore.

» Monnaie de Paris

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