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The Joan Miró Foundation will be presenting Her memory, an exhibition by Kiki Smith organised in collaboration with the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld and the Kunsthalle Nuremberg, containing recent work by this US artist. It could in fact be called an exhibition in progress, since it has been enlarged at each venue before reaching the Foundation, which is the end of its tour.
Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg in 1954 into an artistic family: her mother was an opera singer and her father was the artist Tony Smith. Her work is characterised by a constant reflection on human existence and on life and death; and her drawings of the human body, which are both traumatic and poetic, brought her international recognition at the end of the 1980s. In 2006-2007, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York organised a touring retrospective exhibition, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005", which signalled the end of a period.
In the installation she will be showing at the Joan Miró Foundation, the artist reflects on woman's life cycle, from birth to death, and its relation with the creative cycle: growing up, sources of inspiration, achievement and the end of the road.
Her memory, a unique work of art in itself, is a space for reflection and poetry that continues the characteristic style of Kiki Smith's recent work - somewhere between craft and naïve art - with numerous iconographic references that the artist appropriates and transforms, such as the classical representations of the life of the Virgin Mary, or more ancient mythical figures such as the sibyl, and more modern ones like the suffragettes of the 1920s.
The artist expresses this in various genres and media: sculptures made from porcelain, plaster and bronze are combined with large-format drawings, prints, stained glass, transformed pieces of furniture, painting on mirrors and mural paintings.
With all these, Kiki Smith creates a unique space with a strong visual and poetic charge that cannot fail to make an impact on visitors.
Sponsored by:
Fundació Institut d'Estudis Nord-americans, Barcelona
With the collaboration of:
American Airlines
Consulate-General of the United States of America, Barcelona
El País
