Kiki Smith

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present an exhibition of works by the American artist Kiki Smith focusing on sculpture, drawing, collage, and wall works from the 1990s that draw together Smith’s study of the human body and the natural world. The exhibition is presented in a temporary exhibition space at 211 West 19th Street in Chelsea, while the gallery renovates a new 6,000-square-foot gallery in Tribeca that will open next year.

Sculpting, painting, and weaving the human and animal form in a variety of mediums, Smith has long been interested in our most basic relation to the world we live in. How do we live with our mortality, she asks, and how is our experience influenced by the religious, environmental and social structures around us?

The works in this exhibition exhume the body from its battlegrounds: angry spirits inspired by Greek myths stand with Eve-like bronze women; poisoned birds fallen from the sky. Directly and without rhetoric, Smith’s work exposes our core: emblems of primal loss, sexuality and birth that suggest our unchanging nature over the millennia.

The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned essay by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator at The Kitchen, New York, excerpted here:

Smith excavates the basics of our emotional responses. Untitled (Bones) (1993) and Tailbone (1993) are coated in aluminium, refuting any sentimentality in the link between bones and our mortality. Elevated from our own brittleness and fallibility, they demand a formal study of their architecture.

In Las Animas (1997), Smith wanted to turn what she deemed “deficits”—the shame of wrinkled skin, veins, scars— into a positive energy. While these marks can make us feel alienated from the body we might expect or desire, Smith suggests we celebrate them as evidence of life and its dynamic effects rather than mere evidence of our mortality.

This bodily landscape becomes more literal in My Blue Lake (1995), in which Smith used a rare camera used for geological surveys to render herself as a map. Maps are intended as a diagrammatic representation, but Smith is aware that they cannot inform the reading of the complexities of an individual: the precision of the camera abstracts face, shoulder and hair into indistinct masses.

Harpies (2000) breaks out of the intimate spaces of the body. Originally made for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, these spirits were placed at the gate of the Central Park Zoo to look down upon entering visitors. In Greek mythology, these female deities were powerful hounds of Zeus with malevolent reputations. Smith complicates this narrative by allowing these watchful spirits to be intimidating without forcing scale or typical expressions of menace.

Six Crows (1995) lie on their backs with eyes averted, casualties of an unknown phenomenon of sound or poisoning that has forced them from the sky: a testimony to how out-of-reach these creatures are, unless they have died. Smith gives us the opportunity to study them at proximity, proving the necessity of remembrance. Though made of materials preserve for decades to come, Smith’s objects transcend traditional artistic values of permanence and autonomy in exchange for fluidity and communion.

—Lumi Tan, Senior Curator, The Kitchen, New York, NY

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, West Germany) 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.

Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by Time Magazine as one of the “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.