Kiki Smith

The myth-maker

Kiki Smith’s huge, new-agey tapestry is a typically personal layer cake of art history, myth, female identity and nature. The split between the underworld, earth and heavens recalls the cosmology of the Celts, Native and Central Americans. Its floating nude might be a sprite, a spirit or a goddess.

Celestial bodies

In recent years, Smith has moved away from the physical. In the 1980s her feminist sculptures explored flesh and bone, mining her Catholic upbringing and responding to the Aids crisis. Today, her work has taken a more celestial as well as a nature-loving turn, full of animals and stars.

Silver screen

Sky is partly inspired by an art historical odd couple: 1920s Hollywood and the Middle Ages, eras linked for Smith by their love of pageantry and spectacle. Like movie stars, the tapestries that once cloaked walls were there to dazzle – Sky’s glow specifically references the gleaming lights of RKO Pictures.

Looming large

This, though, is a 21st-century tapestry. Based on collaged drawings that Smith reworks over many months, her tapestries are created on a computerised Jacquard loom.

-Skye Sherwin, “Kiki Smith’s Sky: a layer cake of art history, myth, identity and nature”, in The Guardian, February 2017

On the occasion of her major exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris, the artist Kiki Smith conceived a unique medal-necklace. It is struck in the heart of the Mint’s workshops.

This gilded bronze medal, mounted in long necklace, depicts the pattern of a great tapestry, named Sky, realized by Kiki Smith in 2012. Impressed by the discovery of the Apocalypse Tapestries in Angers, masterpiece of medieval art, the artist began in 2011 the realization of a great cycle of tapestries about nature and cosmos. Animals - hinds, wolves, eagles or butterflies - evolve freely in an idyllic nature, alongside human figures in majesty.

Several of Kiki Smith’s main themes can be found in the engraved motives : the decorative arts, nature and cosmos, as well as the harmonious relationship between animals and female bodies.