Kiki Smith

American, born in Germany, 1954

BiographyKiki Smith was born in Nuremburg, Germany in 1954. She is the daughter of the late Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith (1912-1980). After working individually for several years in New York City, Smith joined the alternative artists' collective Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.), participating in their activities and exhibitions from 1979 to 1982. Her interest in bodily parts manifested itself as early as 1979, and by 1985 she was certified as an Emergency Medical Technician. The experience of training to be an EMT reinforced her interest in the body: "It is physically very beautiful to look at the exposure of the insides and outsides at the same time."5 By the mid '80s, her underground reputation for creating strange, quirky drawings, prints, and sculptures that focused on bodily fluids, secretions, systems, and parts began to surface. Smith's first major New York gallery show at Fawbush Gallery in 1988 won her great acclaim and launched her national and international reputation. She remains in the forefront of the art world today, with frequent solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

Smith's approach to her subject matter is poetic, emotive, and frequently melancholy. Her large crystal sperms (made of glass) are objects of beauty; her paper sculptures, mostly figures of women, hang delicately and often mournfully from ceilings.6 Her images--of the womb, the digestive tract, the nervous system, hair (for example the lithograph, Untitled, 1990, AMAM inv. 91.27)--project humor as well as pathos. Around 1990, Smith began to create lifesize figures in bronze or colored wax. Mostly female, these figures are haunting in their sense of loss: leaking milk or sperm, trailing blood or feces, bent on their knees, with an external spine or slashed skin that exposes red-tinted flesh beneath.

Smith's choice of materials is distinctive and integral to the object's effect on the viewer. She works on paper and with cast glass, bronze, plaster, terra cotta, papier mâché, cloth, and other media, and frequently adds embroidery, weaving, and inks to her works. Prints, which she began making in 1989, as well as installations, are also central to her creative production.