Published in 1929 after a stay in a sanatorium, "L'Amour la poésie" is undoubtedly the most famous collection by the poet who, five years earlier, had taken part with André Breton in the founding of Surrealism. American artist Kiki Smith has taken up the challenge of the Grande Blanche illustrée collection, where artists confront the greatest authors of literature, to give these fiery poems a new flavor. Her ink drawings on Nepalese paper, where a bird's tail can turn into a rosebush, where sequins become stars at the end of eyelashes, accompany Éluard's poetry of ashes and diamonds, just as the fragile, quivering birds do when they fly around the trees singing. In this way, Paul Éluard's words are given a new life, sensual and shivering, with a flavor as blue as an orange. The poet had warned us: his book is endless.

Kiki Smith, a renowned contemporary artist whose work explores the fundamental themes of human existence, natural cycles and mythological structures, continuously pushes the boundaries of contemporary visual art. Her exhibition "Woven Worlds" (Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, 21/11/2024 - 21/02/2025) represents a specific artistic narrative in which material and immaterial, historical and contemporary, body and universe intertwine. Through carefully designed compositions, techniques and motifs, Smith builds a complex artistic space, inviting the viewer to think about the relationships between nature, the human body and the collective imagination.

During her over four-decade-long career, contemporary American artist Kiki Smith predominantly explored themes concerning the human body, identity, and feminism. She was one of the first artists to address the AIDS crisis. Smith’s work also explores issues related to the female body and identity. She has challenged traditional depictions of women and their roles in art, by tackling issues such as sexuality, fertility, and the aging process. Smith’s art reflects a broader social and cultural dialogue about gender and social justice.

Spanning over eight decades of artmaking, the works in “Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe”, Pace Gallery, Geneva (15 March–4 May 2024), encompass a broad range of artistic responses to the celestial imagination over the past century, both literally and metaphorically. Recalling the polished chrome and sleek surfaces of space-age design, the exhibition will include sculptures by Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, Alicja Kwade, and Leo Villareal. Chromatic eruptions course through works by Latifa Echakhch, Sonia Gomes, Hermann Nitsch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Lucas Samaras, suggesting nebulae that refract spectrums of speckled colour. Other, more oblique references to the cosmos recur in works by Torkwase Dyson, Adolph Gottlieb, Matthew Day Jackson, Robert Longo, Robert Rauschenberg, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, and Mika Tajima, which will also be featured in the show.

The Kiki Smith's exhibition "Woven Worlds" (Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Feb 21 - Oct 20 2024), organized in close collaboration with the artist, brings together approximately 50 works, central among them her large-format, woven wall tapestries. This series displays plants and animals, celestial entities and bodies of water, as well as Adam and Eve as biblical archetypes, interwoven into a narrative that draws upon the Story of Creation. With great urgency and poetic clarity, these strikingly designed multicolored tapestries – with silver threads, hand-painted, and finished with gold leaf – unite timeless validity with our immediate present.

Kiki Smith’s seventh solo exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery began as a way to present the artist’s largest editioned print, “Wooden Moon.” [...] Throughout the show, through drawing, photography, sculpture, and print, the artist’s mastery of processes, historic and contemporary representations of imagery, a deep and vast appreciation for that which surrounds us (in both space and time), as well as a commitment to personal vision all provide an opportunity for appreciation, exploration, and reflection.

If you’ve traveled via the Long Island Rail Road service in Manhattan and traversed the MTA’s brand new Grand Central Madison station, you may have noticed a slice of nature indoors in a monumental, wall-spanning mosaic of a woodland deer. Acclaimed artist Kiki Smith completed the piece in 2022, and it’s one of the most recent works in which she honors the natural world and humanity’s role within it. [..] Smith’s works subtly imply a tension between the knowable and unknowable and the potency of consciousness. [...] Celestial bodies and astronomical phenomena often appear in the form of comets or a swirling night sky dotted with geometric stars, reflecting a timeless fascination with the infinity of the universe and our timeless drive to understand it.

Kiki Smith wurde 70 Jahre alt. Im Kunstbetrieb etablierte sie sich mit Druckgrafik, z.B. mit Siebdrucken auf Kleidungsstücken, aber vor allem auch als Bildhauerin. Als Hauptthema zieht sich die Anatomie des menschlichen Körpers durch die verschiedenen Schaffensphasen, oft auch mit politischer Konnotation.

Es muss Liebe sein (11.03.2023 - .01.21.2024): Kiki Smith vermacht ihre Werke der Graphischen Sammlung München, die ihrerseits die renommierte Künstlerin anlässlich ihres 70. Geburtstags mit einer Ausstellung würdigt. "From my heart" - und genau darum geht es in den ausgestellten Werken.

Seine Werke werden in der Ausstellung mit Objekten aus dem Bayerischen Nationalmuseum konfrontiert. [...] Da hängt ein zerknittertes beiges T-Shirt an einem einfachen Drahtbügel, wie man ihn in Wäschereien sieht - wie in der zentralen und ältesten Ausstellung im ersten Stock der Pinakothek der Moderne in München. Darauf ist ein Motiv in Grau aufgedruckt: ein menschliches Herz. Nicht das einfache symbolische Emoji-Herz, sondern die korrekte anatomische Zeichnung. Die Zeitangabe lautet "Anfang der 1980er Jahre".

“I remember visiting the Rodin Museum in Paris when I was young. I saw Camille Claudel’s work there and knew a little about her story, which interested me. People think of Claudel as emoting a kind of psychology or mixing psychology with plastic material. Her sculpture was part of a new obsession with the personal rather than the civic. She was so great at turning the body inward. Our work, in some ways, comes out of that history.”

High-profile artists and art patrons have banded together to support the UK nonprofit Freedom from Torture by donating works to an upcoming auction benefiting the organization. The organization, which supported more than 700 torture survivors from nearly 50 different countries in 2021, has raised more than £1 million ($1.2 million) via its biennial art auction since 2003 and hopes to raise more than £300,000 ($371,000) through this year’s edition. More than sixty artists, including Julian Opie, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Kiki Smith, have contributed pieces to the sale.