Kiki Smith (German American, b. 1954)
Wading, 2004
Hand-colored Iris print with tissue collage
21.625 X 16.625 in.
Purchased with funds from the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment
“Wading” is a portrait of a woman, centered on the paper, surrounded by blankness. Lips drawn together, she stares into the distance with a pensive expression. She is presumably nude, though her body fades away at her shoulders as if she is partially submerged in water: wading. The edges of her body are smudgy and foggy, strengthening the feeling of wading and creating a spiritual, almost mystical atmosphere. The woman has naturalistic human features, but is monochromatic, gray, without color—a stark contrast to the vibrant flowers above her head, delicate tissue paper flowers that highlight her femininity. The blue flowers and the implication of water fuse to express ideas of a female return to the environment, placing ‘women’ amidst the natural world, a recurring theme in Smith’s works.
Kiki Smith is a German American multidisciplinary artist. Her work has detailed the human condition in many forms, expressing a plethora of interconnected ideas: sex, birth and death, regeneration, religion and mythology, womanhood, and reverence for the raw earth. Via a wide breadth of media—books, painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles—Smith weaves these ideas together in an intricate, bizarre, wonderful narrative, symbolizing them with visceral imagery of human and animal figures, gore, and nature. Exploring contemporary socio-political roles for women, Smith was and continues to be a prominent voice in the feminist sphere of the art world.
Smith has had an impressive career; her work has been widely exhibited and she has created artist books including Untitled (Book of Hours) (1986); Fountainhead (1991); and The Vitreous Body (2001). She has received the Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009), the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000), and many other prestigious awards. She was in Time Magazine’s “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World” in 2006 and received the U.S. State Department Medal of Arts from Hillary Clinton in 2012. After speaking at the annual Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Lecture Series in Contemporary Sculpture and Criticism in 2013, Smith became the artist-in-residence for the University of North Texas Institute for the Advancement of the Arts for the 2013-2014 academic year. Smith now lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
Isabel Smith, ’24