Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith, born in German in 1954, uses various media and materials to create her artwork. Since the beginning of her career in 1979, she has been using diverse material as sculptural medium like papier-mâché, wax, wood, fabric, glass, etc., material considered “feminine”. For Smith the use of material is connected to the dualism of the concept of the body as feminine and head as masculine in the Western culture, as well as the definition of nature and women as inferior.
Smith’s focus has been the body and how the body is a physical receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. According to Eleanor Heartney in her essay “Kiki Smith: A View from the Inside Out”, Smith rejects the Western tendency of privileging the vision over other senses. Over the course of her career, Smith has been moving from working about the inside of the body to the outside. In the 80’s her work concentrated on the organs, cells and other systems and now she sees the body as a landscape in which political and social issues take place. Her work states the condition of women. She has created work inspired in biblical and mythological figures changing their historic or mythology meaning.