Edited by Stéphanie Molinard, Marie Chênel. Text by Marie Chênel, Flora Fettah, Camille Morineau, Nora Philippe, Sophie Delpeux, Marc Schwartz, Kiki Smith.
Four decades of Kiki Smith’s searing, intimate investigations of the body and the cosmos
Hbk, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 240 pgs / 120 color. | 3/17/2020 | In stock $39.95
Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. Text by Nadja Argyropoulou, Maggie Wright.
In 2019, multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith (born 1954) was invited to present a site-specific project at the DESTE Foundation Project Space in Hydra, a former slaughterhouse perched on the edge of the sea. Drawing on maritime history, mythology, astronomy and site-specific anthropology, Smith combined naturalistic and fantastic elements into a multipiece composition that reflects the lived and imagined memory of both the slaughterhouse—a stage for sacrifices—and the Hydra region itself.
Alongside photographs of the installation and texts by Maggie Wright and Nadja Argyropoulou, Kiki Smith: Memory presents documentation of Smith's process for this project, which draws on a variety of mediums including sculpture, textiles and drawing.
Published by Silvana Editoriale. Edited by Stéphanie Molinard, Marie Chênel. Text by Marie Chênel, Flora Fettah, Camille Morineau, Nora Philippe, Sophie Delpeux, Marc Schwartz, Kiki Smith.
One of the most influential American artists of her generation, Kiki Smith has spent four decades probing the experience and significance of the body, its knowledge and its limits. “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” Smith has said. Working on pieces both very small and monumental, using a huge variety of mediums associated with both the fine and decorative arts—bronze, plaster, glass, porcelain, tapestry, paper and wax, to name a few—Smith has remained anchored in her core explorations of the human condition and the natural world.
Kiki Smith is a survey monograph of exceptional breadth, featuring the artist’s work from the 1980s to the present day, from her earliest explorations of the physical body, its organs and its fluids, through to her narrative explorations of biblical figures, fairy tales and folklore. Published to accompany a major retrospective at Monnaie de Paris, the artist’s first solo show in a French institution, this volume also pays special attention to the position of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, within Smith’s personal feminist pantheon. Fully illustrated and beautifully produced, Kiki Smith pays tribute to the artist’s urgent, emotionally powerful corpus.
Kiki Smith (born 1954) was first exposed to art by watching and helping her father, pioneering minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This formalist training constituted an important, if visually surprising, source for the work of the largely self-taught artist, who made her name in the 1980s art scene with her visceral sculptures that explored the physicality of the human body.
Published by Kerber. Text by Ellen Seifermann, Martin Hentschel, Kiki Smith.
Born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany, but raised in an artistic family in South Orange, New Jersey (her father was the American sculptor Tony Smith), Kiki Smith has always occupied herself with questions of the human body and condition. Unlike classical figurative sculpture, which hides the insides of the body, Smith's work often visualizes the organs and the bodily fluids, highlighting the fragility and temporality of the body. Her work draws from myths and links spirit, human and animal worlds. Beautifully produced to include a selection of family photographs from the artist's childhood and ancestry alongside generous documentation of her recent concurrent one-person exhibitions in Krefeld, Germany and Nuremberg, this volume sheds new light on one of the most influential American artists of her generation. Taking as her starting point an eighteenth-century American silk embroidery entitled "First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality," which depicts a white woman working at a table while a white child and a black servant rest on one side of her and a closed black coffin sits on the other side, Smith here develops several narrative threads that revolve around the theme of the unmarried woman. With excursions into Christian iconography and the history of the American postcolonial era, she speaks also to the archetype of the inspired female creator or artist.
Well-known as a sculptor, Kiki Smith has also worked extensively as a printmaker--in fact her printed works and other editioned art, including books and multiples, are arguably as important as her sculpture. Smith emerged in the early 1980s as one of a generation of artists who returned to figurative imagery after a period in which American art had leaned to the abstract and conceptual. In Smith's case the interest in the figure was literal: She is fascinated by the anatomy of the human body, which is an immediate and emotionally powerful presence in much of her work. She is equally concerned with the natural world, and animals have become increasingly important in her recent imagery. The heart of printmaking is the ability to create more than one example of an artwork, and this appeals to Smith's interest in the public dissemination of imagery and information. Her work is politically sensitized but she is also fascinated by craft and is constantly exploring and experimenting with her materials. Her prolific body of printed art incorporates techniques extending from elaborate etchings to crude rubber stamps and images ranging from wall-sized lithographs and deluxe artist's books to screen-printed giveaway posters and removable tattoos. Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Other Things accompanies an exhibition devoted to this underacknowledged but crucial dimension of her art.
Published by Charta Libellum. Text by Vivien Bittencourt, Vincent Katz, Kiki Smith.
Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt's book, produced in concert with their video of the same title, traces Kiki Smith's preparations for her eight-room installation at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, which coincided with the 2005 Venice Biennale. It places readers in the midst of the puzzling but effective modus operandi of a highly sophisticated visual artist: Smith works at home, surrounded by books, a pet bird and tiny kitchenette, and moves easily between drawing, collaging, photographing, printing, painting plaster casts and creating furniture fashioned from liquor boxes. Following her to Venice, Katz and Bittencourt observe the complex installation of this work, which proves to be an integral part of its conceptual whole. The book features fascinating and revealing transcripts of the artist's spoken words--spontaneous reflections on her life as an artist among a family of artists.
PUBLISHER Charta Libellum
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 5.75 x 8.25 in. / 132 pgs / 221 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/1/2007 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2007 p. 70
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881586271TRADE List Price: $34.95 CDN $40.00
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited by Siri Engberg. Essays by Siri Engberg, Linda Nochlin and Marina Warner. Interview by Lynne Tillman. Foreword by Kathy Halbreich.
Widely considered to be one of the most engaging and fascinating artists of our time, Kiki Smith has, over the past 25 years, developed into a major figure in the world of twenty-first-century art. Her subject matter is as wide-ranging as the materials her work has encompassed. In the 1980s, with her earliest figural sculptures in plaster, glass and wax, Smith developed an elaborate vocabulary around the forms and functions of the body and its metaphorical as well as physical relationship to society. By the early 1990s, she began to engage with themes of a more religious and mythological nature. Her re-imaginings of biblical women as inhabitants of physical bodies--rather than as abstract bearers of doctrine--led her to make series of sculptural works related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith and others. The artist has more recently considered fairy tales and folk narratives as well as nurturing a growing menagerie of work concerned with animals and the natural world. Smith has now earned a considerable reputation as a virtuoso printmaker and draftsperson, and as a re-inventor of the startling sculptural possibilities present in materials ranging from paper and resin to bronze and porcelain. Organized by the Walker Art Center with the full collaboration of the artist, the exhibition Kiki Smith represents the artist's first full-scale monograph.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Brigitte Reinhardt. Essay by Ilka Becker.
Kiki Smith has long reflected on what it means to be human, to be a woman. Her famous body sculptures, both whole and part reproductions of the human body, made of paper, wax, plaster, ceramics, and bronze, often reduced that experience to natural functions and external violence. This book presents new sculptures, drawings, and room installations, in a broadened range of topics and materials, including glass, that cover the entire macrocosm of human and animal life, nature and the stars.
Published by International Center of Photography. Essay by Helaine Posner. Visual Essay by Kiki Smith. Introduction by Willis E. Hartshorn.
Kiki Smith: Telling Tales accompanies a major exhibition at the International Center of Photography. Smith, best known for her sculptures of the human body, presents her recent photographic and multimedia work on the theme of fairy tales. The centerpiece of this book is the full-color visual essay of her renditions and investigations of the characters of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, the biblical Eve juxtaposed with Snow White, and various enigmatic female puppets. Through these symbolic female figures, the artist explores themes of temptation and sexuality, attraction and danger, and the impact of knowledge. Myths, fairy tales, and childhood fantasies predominate.
PUBLISHER International Center of Photography
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.25 x 6 in. / 72 pgs / 42 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780933642287TRADE List Price: $12.95 CDN $15.00
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith: Her Home
Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things
Kiki Smith: The Venice Story
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith