Kiki Smith

The wolf is at the door. Few artworks literalize this time-honored phrase for incipient ruin and harm better than Kiki Smith’s Sainte Geneviève (1999). A delicate yet oversized drawing on Nepalese paper, it depicts a female nude standing unprotected next to a pair of wolves while two birds—crows? turtledoves?—hover overhead. A mashup of various themes Smith has explored throughout her decades-long career, the piece speaks not only to Smith’s fascination with and reverence for the natural world, but also her noted penchant for inventing her own complex mythologies and narratives where religion, folk tradition, and the Western canon fall short.

Part of a series of works on paper and bronze executed between 1999 and 2002 featuring Sainte Geneviève, the Patron Saint of Paris, Smith’s heroine appears as an unadorned everywoman who is also, paradoxically, equipped with magical gifts. If Geneviève is alleged to have saved Paris from the Huns, she is also often associated with Saint Francis of Assisi due to her close relationships with animals and her ability, in particular, to domesticate wolves. Yet another example of how crises invite new readings of important artworks, Smith’s celebrated drawing channels the hope and risk associated with major social, economic, and cultural transitions, both historically and in the here and now.

— CVF, USFCAM

About Kiki Smith

(Nuremberg, Germany, 1954)

She lives and works in New York City.

Since the 1980s Kiki Smith has been known for a multidisciplinary practice that intimately relates to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales. Additionally, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Smith was recognized in 2006 by Time Magazine as one of the “TIME 100” people who shape our world. Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture; the Edward MacDowell Medal; the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award; the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts (conferred by Hillary Clinton); and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.

Gallery website: pacegallery.com