KIKI SMITH. Reflection

Under the title Reflection, the Barbara Gross Galerie is featuring a cycle of large-format works on paper
by Kiki Smith dealing with the human condition and the subject of female artistry and home life. With a
focus on drawing, the exhibition represents a supplement to the retrospective Kiki Smith: Procession on
view concurrently at the Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Reflecting on human existence, life, death, and loss has stood at the center of Kiki Smith’s work from the
outset. While her early works focused on the human being in its corporeality and in relation to nature
and the universe, in 2005 she shifted her subject to the concrete everyday life of woman, which for
centuries took place above all in the realm of the home. Inspired by Prudence Punderson’s 1783 silk
needlework First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality, depicting the life of an American woman from the
colonial period “from the cradle to the grave,” Smith developed a multilayered body of work in
subsequent years in which the house became a place associated specifically with female creativity.

The works on Nepal paper shown here cover the walls of the gallery space almost completely, together
creating an open narrative about the life of several generations of women. As in a chamber play, all the
scenes seem to play out in the same space, although the cast changes and the age of the near life-sized
female figures advances. In Smith’s pictorial cosmos, motifs such as a package, empty, occupied, and
overturned chairs or light bulbs are symbolically charged and stand for arrival and departure, presence
and absence, as well as inspiration and artistic creation.

Smith depicts the women in moments of contemplation and draws attention to their dignity and
radiance. While their clothing refers to the present, their poses and gestures recall art-historical role
models, ranging from Christian iconography and Prudence Punderson to images of women from the
Venetian Rococo and Frida Kahlo.

Just as certain gestures, knowledge, and abilities are passed down from generation to generation and
continually change in the process, the technique of the collaged works on paper—which are partly
lithographed, partly drawn on fine Nepal paper—allows the artist to use individual motifs, faces, and
body parts repeatedly, always varying and lending them new shape. The principle of reiteration is
essential for Smith: “It’s about repetition versus uniqueness. My interest in printmaking is that prints
mimic what we are as human: we are all the same and yet everyone is different."

Smith also transposes her drawings into a diversity of other media, collaborating closely with different
workshops and specialized manufacturers. Hence, the silver and bronze sculptures of birds displayed in
the gallery’s skylight space are the outcome of a long process of duplication, transposition, and variation.