Kiki Smith in her Secret Garden

For Kiki Smith’s first solo exhibition in a French institution, Monnaie de Paris is exhibiting until 9 February 2020 a corpus of works by the artist, ranging from the 1980s to sculptures conceived for the exhibition. This oeuvre, which has the body for subject, evolving from the organic body, fragmented, to the fusional body merging with the animal and plant kingdoms, is also the object of the artist’s first exhibition in Belgium. Entitled Entre Chien et Loup [ Between Dog and Wolf / In The Twilight], it presents more than 100 prints, sculptures and drawings from 1981 to the present day, at the La Louvière Centre of Engraving and the Printed Image, until 23 February. A selection of engravings and lithographs is also being exhibited at Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris until 16 November. Title of the exhibition: Homecoming.

If there is such a thing as an American artistic aristocracy, Kiki Smith certainly belongs to it. As the daughter of acclaimed minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, she was raised in the midst of the mid-century avant-garde. Frequent family visitors included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Mark di Suvero, and Richard Tuttle. As a child, she and her sister helped their father create paper models of his sculptures. Now, at age 65, Kiki Smith is arguably an even more famous artist than Tony Smith. But while she acknowledges her father’s influence on certain aspects of her work, especially her interest in seriality and repetition, their work could hardly be more different. The austere simplicity ofTony Smith’s modular arrangements of polished steel, aluminum and bronze is light years away from his daughter’s maximalism. Her works are often fashioned from such delicate materials as paper, plaster, beeswax, beads, glass, and ceramics. When she does use bronze or aluminum, it is manipulated to suggest human skin, animal fur or living plants. Glass sculptures of body parts, folk art-inspired figures and tapestries teeming with flowers and birds draw us into the depths of the psyche, plunge us into a natural world where humans have become irrelevant or conjure fractured versions of archetypal myths and legends. Smith’s works have been seen as expressions of female experience, reflections of the carnality of her Catholic imagination and explorations of the fragility and vulnerability of nature in an age of climate