Tag: Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany; lives and works in New York, USA) creates work that confronts the body as a site of vulnerability, knowledge and transformation. Working across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation, she explores anatomy, mortality, femininity and the natural world with an unflinching yet deeply empathetic eye. Bodies appear fragmented, exposed or hybridised—at once fragile and resilient.

Smith’s materials are central to her meaning. Wax, paper, bronze, glass and textiles are handled with sensitivity, allowing surfaces to feel intimate and tactile. Her figures often bleed, leak, stretch or dissolve, collapsing distinctions between inside and outside, human and animal, physical and spiritual. Folklore, mythology and religious imagery weave through her practice, grounding personal experience within broader symbolic systems.

Emerging in the 1980s amid feminist and activist movements, Smith reshaped how the body could be represented—rejecting idealisation in favour of honesty and care. Her work insists on attention: to pain, to pleasure, to cycles of life and decay. Quietly radical and enduringly influential, Smith’s practice offers a language for thinking about embodiment as something complex, porous and profoundly human.