Kiki Smith Recent Photographic Work

Kiki Smith: Recent Photographic Work reflects the artist’s burgeoning interest in the natural world, extending her explorations of the human form to the interrelationship that exists between humans, animals, the environment, and the cosmos.

The recent work, created during 1997-98, also joins Smith’s sometimes morbid tendencies with an optimistic belief in a state of nature or grace. The exhibition will include a series of Iris prints derived from color photographs showing details or fragments of her well-known figurative sculptures, as well as a series of color photographs depicting birds and animals, images that she took in natural history museums, zoos and in the landscape. These latter images are assembled into grids of up to 20 prints in which the overall patterning and abstraction of the composition are emphasized and a sense of movement is derived from the repetition of a singular image from varying perspectives.

About the Artist

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany and presently resides in New York. She is the daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith. Smith’s work has been presented in one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Kiki Smith: Recent Photographic Work was organized by Helaine Posner, the List Center’s former curator, with the International Center of Photography (ICP), Midtown in collaboration with Katy Kline, former List Center director and now director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. The exhibition will travel to the ICP May–August 1999. The exhibition coincides with the recent publication of a 200-page, full-color monograph Kiki Smith by Helaine Posner published by Bulfinch Press.