By Kiki Smith
Located in Detroit, MI
" Noon 2007" Portrait of Musician Ryan Bingham engraving by Kiki Smith of a young man looking directly at the viewer. His look is not one of challenge, but more of a questioning nature. It is numbered on verso 28/33, and dated 2007.
Kiki Smith (1954 - ) is a West German-born American artist. Her work encompasses many themes: sex, birth, regeneration and death along with personal investigation of her life and those of her family. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS and gender. Her recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
Her father was sculpture artist, Tony Smith and her mother was actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. Although Kiki's work takes a very different form than that of her parents, early exposure to her father's process of making geometric sculptures allowed her to experience formal craftsmanship firsthand.
Smith was enrolled at Hartford Art School in Connecticut for eighteen months from 1974 to 1975, then moved to New York City in 1976 and joined Collaborative Projects (Colab), an artist collective. The influence of this radical group's use of unconventional materials can be in seen in her work. For a short time in 1984, she studied to be an emergency medical technician and sculpted body parts, and by 1990, she began to craft human figures.
In addition to print making Kiki Smith has created in a number of different mediums such as film, sculpture, tapestries, books and the confines of commissions.
She experimented in a wide range of printmaking processes. Some of her earliest print works were screen-printed dresses, scarves and shirts, often with images of body parts. In association with Colab, Smith printed an array of posters in the early 1980s containing political statements or announcing Colab events. In 1988 she created "All Souls”, a fifteen-foot screen-print work featuring repetitive images of a fetus, an image Smith found in a Japanese anatomy book...
Category
Early 2000s American Modern Kiki Smith Art