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Smith, Kiki

Smith, Kiki

▪ American artist
born Jan. 18, 1954, Nürnberg, Ger.

      German-born American sculptor, installation artist, and printmaker whose intense and expressionistic work investigated the body and bodily processes.

      The daughter of the American actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence and the American architect and sculptor Tony Smith, she was born in Germany, where her mother had launched a career in opera. The family returned to the United States in 1955, and Smith was raised in South Orange, N.J. After briefly attending the Hartford Art School, she moved to New York in 1976. Her work as a sculptor bore little resemblance to that of her father. Where he was abstract and nonfigurative, she was engaged in the study of human anatomy and the natural world.

      Her work in the 1980s often examined particular parts of the body—hands, the digestive system, the pelvis, the liver—using materials such as cloth, paper, and ceramics to depict the mystery and vulnerability of the body. In 1985 she briefly studied to be an emergency medical technician. By 1990 she had begun to create fully realized human figures, and she often employed beeswax to heighten the suggestion of flesh, as in Untitled (1990). Smith used the body as a metaphor for the passions and tribulations of existence, and her work reinvigorated the tradition of expressionist and emotive figural sculpture.

Additional Reading
Helaine Posner and David Frankel, Kiki Smith (1998); Helaine Posner and Christopher Lyon, Kiki Smith (2005); Siri Engberg, Linda Nochlin, and Marina Warner, Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005 (2005).

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Universalium. 2010.

  
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