Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) is an American artist who grew up in New Jersey and has lived and worked in New York since the mid-1970s. The daughter of the sculptor Tony Smith, she did not follow a formal academic training but developed her practice through exposure to the New York art world of the late 1970s and her involvement with Collaborative Projects (Colab) and other collectives.

Her early work — including wax casts of internal body parts and photographic prints using bodily fluids as material — addressed the human body with a directness that departed from the predominantly dematerialized and conceptual tendencies of the preceding decade. Figures of women in states of vulnerability, expulsion, and transformation recur across her output in a range of materials that encompass both the monumental and the intimate. Her practice has expanded over the decades to incorporate myth, fairy tale, astronomy, and the natural world: wolves, birds, and botanical imagery are recurring figures. She is also a prolific printmaker, with a sustained engagement with the craft of intaglio, lithography, and woodcut that has given printmaking a central rather than secondary role in her career.

A major retrospective was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and traveled to the Whitney Museum and the Walker Art Center. Her work is held by MoMA, the Whitney, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.