Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) loved creative taxonomies, often creating arrangements of terms and pictograms as artworks. In one work, under the heading I Love, the sign of a snake can be found next to the emblem for justice, with an orange spot for the corresponding color next to two stars as a symbol for astrology. Niki de Saint Phalle A–Z takes the same liberty and puts the many facets of Saint Phalle's work into the order of the alphabet. This logical order is deceptive, though. From A as in AIDS to Z as in Zurich Angel, from B as in Bride to V as in Vanitas, a mosaic of concepts emerges that explores the various levels of meaning in her manifold oeuvre and playfully engages them in mutual commentary.
Katharina Sykora (born 1955) is a German art historian and curator specializing in the intersection of painting, photography and film; visual constructions of gender and authorship; and mind and affect.

The three rooms of the Grotto, built in the Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hanover in 1676, were originally decorated with mussels, crystals, glass and minerals, serving as a place of enchantment and as a cool retreat on hot days. After its restoration for Expo 2000, the inside of the Grotto was newly designed according to plans by French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). This represents the final work in her remarkable oeuvre, beautifully captured in this volume. The octagonal middle room and those to its left and right were splendidly decorated with mosaics made from colored glass and mirrors, with pebbles and numerous painted sculptures made of fiberglass. The spiral-shaped arrangement of the ornaments around the column in the entrance hall symbolizes spirituality, with the western mirrored room signifying day and life and the eastern blue room night and the cosmos.

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation—her "bringing to life"—writes Rudick, "is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness."

Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects—including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany—Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).

Niki de Saint Phalle’s sensual Nanas—colorful, buxom female figures—laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world. But the self-taught artist’s creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre—ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theater, film and architecture—is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based in part on her efforts to process her own experiences, Saint Phalle addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. This publication sheds new light on the artist’s exceptional personality and uncovers an oeuvre that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was born near Paris and moved to the US in 1933. During her teen years, Saint Phalle was a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Life in 1949 and, three years later, on the cover of French Vogue. At 18 Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later to Paris, where she exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery. In 1971 Saint Phalle married Jean Tinguely, and throughout that decade created the public sculptures and parks for which she became celebrated. Saint Phalle died of emphysema in California in May 2002.

This volume brings newfound attention to Niki de Saint Phalle’s (1930-2002) work in architecture and public sculpture, and the commercial products such as perfume and jewelry that she produced to fund these ambitious projects.

Featuring a wide selection of images of her architectural works and rarely seen archival materials, this book places these projects within the context of her larger boundary-defying practice, drawing connections with politically charged works such as the films and books she made in response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Charting Saint Phalle's many efforts to radically open her practice beyond the confines of the art world, it serves as a survey of her practice from the 1960s until the early 2000s. Edited and with an essay by exhibition curator Ruba Katrib, the publication features new scholarship by Anne Dressen and Nick Mauss, Alex Kitnick, and Lanka Tattersall.