Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

Kiki Smith is known for the incredible breadth of her output, working in sculpture, drawing, painting, weaving, printmaking and installation. Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany to opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence, who was performing in Germany at the time, and American sculptor Tony Smith. The family relocated to South Orange, New Jersey in 1955. Though Smith recalls helping her father make cardboard maquettes for his sculptures, her future work would not resemble her father’s abstract and non-figurative style, but would instead focus on the natural world.

Smith studied at Hartford Art School in Connecticut in 1974, but dropped out before graduating. She moved to New York City in 1976, where she began making monotypes of everyday objects, before moving on to make expressionistic work about the human body and its constituent parts. Smith considers herself to be self-taught, and describes herself as “a thing maker.”

Smith took on odd jobs to make ends meet, including a spell in which she trained to be an emergency medical technician, and stints as an electrician’s assistant and a short-order cook. Of her early career, Smith explained that “I had my first solo exhibition when I was thirty-four. By that point, I’d been showing in New York for maybe ten years already. Many of my contemporaries were already showing, so in some ways, I am a late bloomer. But I needed that time. It’s not like I was sitting on a gold mine at home that the world needed to see! I needed every one of those days of struggling and hating everything I made. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere […] When I was a young woman, showing my work gave me a tremendous amount of energy because there were so few models or opportunities for women artists, in terms of recognition in the power structures of museums. That meant you could just do anything you wanted, because nobody cared.”

Smith began exploring animal imagery, alongside more mythological and fantastical themes in her figurative work, examining the conflation between women and the natural world. Per Nancy Hass, writing for the New York Times, Smith’s post-feminist art “challenges the notion of decorative figuration as somehow less powerful than muscular, largely male abstraction and minimalism…Hers is a liminal, defiantly female place of both shadow and light, where transformation is effortless, if ultimately unsettling.” Smith’s work began to attract attention in the 1990s, elevating the artist to become one of the most widely shown artists worldwide, with her work included in the permanent collection of almost all major international museums. Smith is notoriously prolific, exhibiting widely in addition to her career as a teacher. In her own words: “I just have a hard time not doing something with my hands all the time.”