Niki de st phalle biography of barack

Facebook , opens in a new tab. Instagram , opens in a new tab. Join the mailing list. The shooting paintings evolve to include elements of spectacle and performance. Niki has her first solo exhibition in Paris in and becomes friends with American artists staying in Paris, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and his wife Clarice.

Marcel Duchamp introduces Niki and Tinguely to Salvador Dali, with whom they go to Spain for a celebration in his honor and create a life-size exploding bull out of plaster, paper, and fireworks for the end of a traditional bullfight. Niki and Tinguely travel around California, Nevada, and Mexico, participating in exhibits and happenings. Niki and Tinguely move to an old country inn outside of Paris at the end of Niki begins creating figurative reliefs — confrontational depictions of women, some giving birth, as well as dragons, monsters, and brides.

Paul Getty Trust. The outer form of Hon is a building-size giant reclining Nana with an interior environment entered from between her legs. This piece garners worldwide attention and intensifies her desire to build her own sculpture garden. Working on Le Paradis Fantastique, she is exposed to the toxic fumes of polyester resin. This and other materials used in her work cause severe damage to her lungs, resulting in recurrent health problems.

Niki designs Nana inflatables, a multiple in plastic that are produced and distributed in the United States. Niki travels to India and Egypt, broadening the repertoire of cultural experiences and visual associations used in her work. In , Niki receives a second private architectural commission in Belgium and begins a productive association with art fabricator Haligon for her large-scale sculptures and work in editions.

Niki creates three large-scale Nanas for a permanent site near the town hall in Hannover, Germany in The citizens nickname them Sophie, Charlotte, and Caroline in honor of three historically distinguished women of Hannover. Niki is hospitalized with a serious lung ailment and recuperates in the Swiss mountains. While there, she meets an old friend from her time in New York in the s, Marella Caracciolo Agnelli.

Niki de Saint Phalle paired bold, jubilant, and cartoonish feminine forms with dark and disturbing material in her multifaceted artistic career. Throughout, she continually disrupted long-held conventions in art, and her iconoclastic approach to her identity and society at large made her an early and important voice to both the Feminist movement and the development of early Conceptual Art.

Unlike many of her contemporaries who prioritized the idea behind the work of art rather than the aesthetic demonstration of the idea, Saint Phalle's pieces were highly expressive, visually bold, and often playful - a style that celebrated aesthetics instead of interrogating its structures and conventions. She realized some of the most ambitious, immersive sculptural environments of the 20 th century, and also made intensely personal, inward-looking work that reflected on her inner life and relationships.

Saint Phalle's broad influence is marked by the variety of contemporary cultural identities and communities that now 'claim' her as their own, including feminist, queer, and racial empowerment movements. After years of creating innovative art de Saint Phalle came upon a signature visual language that can now be found in various location in the world.

For example, her work created along with her partner Jean Tinguely enlivens The Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, which is located just to the side of the Center Pompidou. They were made by fixing polythene bags of paint to a board, and covering them with a thick plaster surface. Viewers were then invited to shoot a rifle at the surface, popping the bags and causing the paint to run down the textured white surface.

This particular work was shot at by a number of notable artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The process of creating the artwork became a live performative event done in the public eye and with the public's participation, challenging traditional perceptions of the artist as a solitary, hermetic figure. Shooting Paintings involve the viewer directly and physically in the creation of work, and leave the resulting image to chance.

Critic Craig Staff interprets the aggressive nature of these shooting pictures as representing the death of traditional painting as a medium. He claims "it is difficult not to interpret Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings iconoclastically and within a set of terms that unequivocally sought to negate, if not entirely bring down, the medium. They still retained many of the essentials of painting: a canvas as a blank ground, and paint constituting the form that populates the ground.

The element of spectacle, particularly the arresting image of an attractive young girl wielding a gun as part of her art, was a crucial aspect of these performance-paintings. The Tirs events drew personalities such as Jane Fonda, whose image as a young and beautiful political dissident of the state was also a media spectacle in the s.

Plaster, paint, string, polythene and wire on wood - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. This abstracted female figure is made from found objects and fixed on the flat surface of a wall.

Niki de st phalle biography of barack

It resembles, but does not completely conform, to the method of sculptural assemblage , a combination of sculpture and collage that brings in a third dimension by adding elements that protrude or project out of a planar, two-dimensional surface. This work responds to the genre-blending of mid-century abstraction, and is definitive of Saint Phalle early feminist works.

The figure is strangely proportioned, with a physical emphasis on the center of her body: her breasts, groin and hips are strongly exaggerated. The piece expresses Saint Phalle's attitude towards the female condition, which she saw as a highly ambiguous and contentious state. The figure stitches together suggestions and formal elements of the constructed, biological-cultural stages of womanhood: youthful and sexualized, maternal and abundant, elderly and confined.

The figure also has no arms, indicating a lack of female agency and disempowerment within a society that strongly delineates women's roles in accordance with diminishing reproductive capacity. In addition, the woman is presented in cruciform, a symbol of suffering and martyrdom that also implicates the church and its androcentric view of the world.

As Eunice Lipton puts it, "this aristocratic Catholic woman who'd been brought up in a strict household attacked the church with sculptures [ In perfectly calibrated formal choices, de Saint Phalle disfigured long-held articles of faith - high art, the family, the church. Found objects and polyester paint - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. This large-scale sculpture presents a highly non-traditional view of the goddess figure.

Instead, this figure is large-limbed, actively in motion, black-skinned, and adorned in a colorful, cartoonish bathing costume. Black Venus is one of several black Nanas French slang term for woman; like chick or broad Saint Phalle made during this period, as a statement of solidarity with the civil rights movement. The black Nanas were among the first in the series, and exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September As Elaine Hedges argues, "Saint Phalle is aware that most western myths handed down through time present few female models with whom women of today - particularly women of ethnic and racial minority groups - can identify, or even wish to identify.

Portraying the goddess of love and beauty as strong, active and black, rather than mild, passive and white, Saint Phalle affirms the being and beauty of the black woman. I have made many black figures in my work. It has always been an important color for me.. Black is also me now. This work is Saint Phalle's largest Nana figure. It is a large-scale sculptural work which viewers could enter from the vaginal opening, and could hold up to people at a time.

The interactive element of the work was something which deeply interested Saint Phalle at the time, and is an extension of her explorations into audience participation begun with the Shooting Paintings. Its structure references classic architectural theories about the entrances to cathedrals and their metaphoric and symbolic relationship to female genitalia, which Saint Phalle literalizes by having visitors enter the sculpture through the figure's vagina.

This feature also presents the woman's body as a place of exchange and creation, a space which is entered and explored, and also generative of new life by way of its exit. The scale of this work also inspired Saint Phalle to begin working on a more architectural scale, culminating in her sculpture and actually a home that one can live in The Empress.

Plaster and paint - [destroyed, originally in Moderna Musseet, Stockholm]. In , the artist was awarded the Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture, by the Japan Art Association. She also designed and built for the Port of San Diego a metre 39 ft tall, ton sculpture, Coming Together. The largest of her Skinnies series, the artwork consists of a colorful half female and a black-and-white half male face joined together, covered with mosaic and stones.

Saint Phalle endured intensive care hospitalization for six months [ 10 ] before dying of respiratory failure caused by emphysema at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, on 21 May Up until the end, she continued to design further developments for her Tarot Garden in Italy, including a maze , for which land was cleared, and metal rods were installed.

Posthumously, the Grotto — was completed according to detailed instructions left by Saint Phalle. The permanent installation, in the Grosser Garten , Herrenhausen Gardens , Hannover, consisted of three rooms which were decorated on every surface with mirrors, glass, ceramics, and colored stones. Posthumously, Queen Califia's Magical Circle — , a foot 37 m diameter sun-drenched sculpture garden designed by Saint Phalle, was opened in Escondido, California in October It is enclosed in a foot m undulating wall topped with large python -like snakes, and includes a maze and 10 large sculptures she designed, comprising the most extensive public collection of her work in the US.

Throughout her career, Saint Phalle was outspoken in addressing important religious conflict, political, pandemic health, race, gender, reproductive rights, food security, climate change, and cultural issues of the time. Her enormous, curvaceous Nanas celebrated the fecund female form, featuring large breasts and buttocks, splayed limbs, joyous dance postures, and often, black skin.

Many of Saint Phalle's sculptures are large and are exhibited in public places. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation maintains an online map and catalog of all her extant public artworks, including a pizza oven in La Jolla, California. A short, annotated bibliography is available at the Niki Charitable Art Foundation website. A comprehensive listing is at the Niki Charitable Art Foundation website.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. French plastician, painter and sculptor. Neuilly-sur-Seine , France. La Jolla, California , US. Harry Mathews. Jean Tinguely. Early life and education — [ edit ]. First marriage and children — [ edit ].

Tirs — [ edit ]. Nanas — [ edit ]. Tarot Garden — [ edit ]. Main article: Tarot Garden. Mirrored mosaic ceiling inside The Empress. Detail of Justice. Mosaic ceiling inside The Tower. The Empress internal view. Later years — [ edit ]. Legacy [ edit ]. Gallery [ edit ]. Golem , Kiryat Hayovel , Israel. Adam and Eve , Ulm, Germany. Lifesaver Fountain , Duisburg , Germany.

Major exhibitions [ edit ]. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. April Public art [ edit ]. Museums and collections [ edit ]. Bibliography by publication date [ edit ]. Filmography [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Niki Charitable Art Foundation. Retrieved SWI swissinfo. Los Angeles Times. Larass, Petra.

Munich: Prestel. ISBN OCLC The New York Times. Huffington Post. Archived from the original on Is Wife of Bridegroom's Brother Alexandre". Retrieved 2 April Retrieved 26 January Thibault de Saint Phalle Takes Mt. The New Yorker. Niki de Saint Phalle. The Guardian. The Telegraph.