Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smithis a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, gender and race, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth18 January 1954
CityNuremberg, Germany
CountryUnited States of America
In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing.
I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go.
I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day.
I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.
I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.
Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.
Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.
One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.
Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.
I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.
Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.
I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.
One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that's really beautiful too. It just isn't beautiful in a way that I knew it was beautiful before.
I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.