Artwork Description
Kiki Smith – Untitled
Dimensions: 35 x 24.5″ paper
Year: 1992
Medium: etching on rice paper
Edition: 2/30
Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth, and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
In 1982, Smith received her first solo exhibition, “Life Wants to Live”, at The Kitchen. Since then, her work has been exhibited in nearly 150 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide and has been featured in hundreds of significant group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, New York (1991, 1993, 2002); La Biennale di Firenze, Florence, Italy (1996-1997; 1998); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2005, 2009).
Past solo exhibitions have been held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (1996–97); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996–97); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1997–98); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1998); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (1999); St. Louis Art Museum (1999-2000); and the International Center for Photography (2001).
In 1996, Smith exhibited in a group show at SITE Santa Fe, along with Kara Walker.
In 2005, “the artist’s first full-scale American museum survey” titled Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Then, an expansion came to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the show originated. At the Walker, Smith coauthored the catalogue raisonné with curator Siri Engberg.
The exhibition traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and finally to La Coleccion Jumex in Ecatepec de Morelos outside Mexico City. In 2008, Smith gave Selections from Animal Skulls (1995) to the Walker in honor of Engberg.
Smith participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, from May 13 – November 16, 2017.
In 2018, Smith took part in Frieze Sculpture (part of the Frieze Art Fair, where her work Seer (Alice I), Timothy Taylor (gallery), was presented in Regent’s Park, London, England, from July 4 – October 7, 2018.
In 2019, the DESTE Foundation’s Project Space at the Slaughterhouse on Hydra Island featured Memory, a site-specific exhibition.
In 2019 The 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris presented the first solo show of Smith by a French public institution.
In 2019, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria, presented a solo show of Smith entitled Processions, presenting about sixty works from the last three decades.