KIKI SMITH | From the Jacquard Tapestry Series

Robischon Gallery is very pleased to present its third exhibition of Jacquard tapestries by the renowned, German-born American artist Kiki Smith. Internationally celebrated, Smith is widely acknowledged for her early 1980s sculptural expressions of the female body. Often shown as anatomical fragments – which were powerfully conveyed through objects and drawings based on human organs, cellular forms and the nervous system – Smith’s overall sense of the fragility of life and a heightened awareness of mortality reflected the cultural mood of the time. Staying true yet evolving, the recurrent subject matter in the artist’s work has been in offering the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling while further incorporating through the years, aspects of Nature such as animals and birds, as narrative expressions of ancient myths and folk tales. Smith’s distinctive language often communicates in thematic ways – anchored in a kind of sacred triad – where life, death and resurrection speak to the human condition and the cyclical nature of all things.

Well-respected for her multimedia studio practice and broad sense of experimentation, Smith’s ongoing creative vision and exploration of a range of techniques has made the medium of tapestry an inspired vehicle for the artist’s language. While tapestry itself is rooted in the Medieval – a visually ripe medium in which to convey ancient narratives for Smith – it is the current contemporary mode in the evolved Jacquard weaving process (established in 1804), which employs the digital sophistication in order to produce the artist’s compelling tactile surfaces. Smith begins with collaged layouts for her suite of tapestries which involve an endless variety of techniques and media, with glitter, colored pencil, watercolor and a myriad of printed materials including cut Nepalese paper in a landscape of widely diverse textures. She then sends a large-scale collage on paper to the noted Magnolia Editions tapestry studio, often accompanied by various smaller etchings and drawings. These components are then scanned and photographed at high resolution and then combined and manipulated digitally by the artist. After each digital revision, Smith and the studio print large-scale proofs on paper so that the artist can continue to work directly on their surfaces with more watercolors, ink, and other media. “This way,” Magnolia Editions Donald Farnsworth points out, “the artist’s reaction is physical, in her studio; she’s not just reacting to a computer screen.” Each tapestry edition undergoes dozens of steps and versions on its way to completion, from the large, collaged paper drawings to digital files; prints to reprints, to reprints with over-painting and more collaging; painting, weaving, and reweaving until each detail, texture, and color meets exactly with Smith’s specifications.  In some cases, the weavings take several years to reach its last incarnation. This final weaving of each mixed-media amalgam into a single textile-object carries within it, according to the artist, a metaphoric message of a complex layered world revealing an abundance of interwoven threads which further suggest in symbol, a pervasive spiritual connection.

Within the process of making editioned work, such as textile or printmaking, Kiki Smith conveys that for her, the act of repetition is a powerful tool, both visually and behaviorally, and that she uses repetition to express spiritual or ritualistic feelings throughout her artwork.  She states that the process “mimics what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet everyone is different. I think there’s a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.” The artist also suggests a theme that is common to her tapestries, which is an absence of boundaries - a way to acknowledge animistic spiritual traditions and myths.  Smith states that the presence of plants, animals, and heavenly bodies throughout her works suggests, “how imperative it is at this moment to celebrate and honor the wondrous and precarious nature of being here on earth.”

Kiki Smith’s interdisciplinary work has been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions and resides in private and public collections worldwide such as the Guggenheim Collection, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Tate, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany. Her over 25 museum exhibitions include the retrospectives Kiki Smith ― Free Fall at the Seoul Museum of Art, 2023, Kiki Smith: Sojourn at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009, and the first full-scale Museum survey of her work Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Smith’s work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. The artist is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was granted the title Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2017. Smith’s awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2016), the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton (2013); the Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009); the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award from Purchase College School of the Arts (2009) and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2000). In 2006 TIME Magazine named Kiki Smith one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” Smith is teaching faculty at NYU and Columbia University.