Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, when Kiki Smith pours her sculptural entrails onto the sterile walls of our galleries, she doesn’t just offer us a disturbing spectacle. This American artist born in 1954 in Nuremberg, trained amidst the urgency of 1980s downtown New York, confronts us with an anatomical truth that our hyper-connected era strives to obscure. Her work, woven between brutal figuration and textile mysticism, between failing bodies and mythological creatures, reveals the fundamental powerlessness of our bodies in a world that claims to control them.
Smith’s art flourishes in that blurry zone where flesh meets symbol, where visceralness dialogues with archetype. Her beeswax sculptures with cadaverous hues, her prints where bodily fluids spill, her jacquard tapestries populated with half-woman half-beast hybrids, form an obsessive corpus questioning our relationship to the body and mortality. Far from the spectacular gesticulations of her 1980s contemporaries, Smith develops an aesthetics of abjection drawing equally on the Catholic imagery of her childhood and the political urgency of the AIDS epidemic.
This woman who was trained as an emergency medical technician before sculpting human organs in bronze, who still lives today in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, cultivates a craft approach to trauma. Her installations transform exhibition space into a cabinet of anatomical curiosities, a poetic morgue where each piece questions the fragility of our fleshly envelope. When she declares that “the history of the whole world lives in your body” [1], Smith does not fall into empty metaphor but states a clinical truth her art seeks to demonstrate.
The Surrealist Heritage: when the unconscious takes flesh
To grasp the radicalism of her approach, one must understand how her work follows the lineage of surrealism while subverting it. André Breton and his cohorts opened the floodgates of the unconscious, explored dream territories, dissected the mechanisms of psychic automatism. But where the male surrealists fantasized about the female body as an object of desire or anxiety, Smith flips the equation: she makes the female body the subject of her own exploration.
Her first works from the 1980s, these molds of internal organs displayed like relics, immediately evoke the surrealist aesthetic of Max Ernst or Hans Bellmer. But Smith does not linger on the convulsive beauty dear to Breton. She prefers anatomical accuracy, clinical precision, physiological truth. Her “Untitled” blown glass pieces containing imaginary bodily fluids recall Man Ray’s impossible objects, but stripped of their playful dimension to retain only their unsettling charge.
The artist pushes the surrealist investigation further by literally materializing unconscious impulses. When she sculpts “Tale” in 1992, this female figure on all fours dragging behind her a string of black pearl excrements, Smith updates the scatological fantasies that Dalí or Bataille only dared to evoke by metaphors. This work, which caused scandal at its first presentation, crystallizes the whole ambiguity of her position: revealing without complacency the most repugnant aspects of our biological condition.
Smith’s surrealism (if one may say) is distinguished by its refusal of idealization. Where Magritte transformed the body into a poetic enigma, Smith restitutes it in its prosaic reality. Her wax women are neither ancient Venuses nor erotic fantasies, but precise, detailed, vulnerable anatomies. This documentary approach to the marvelous paradoxically brings Smith closer to surrealist photographers like Brassaï or Boiffard, who hunted strangeness in urban daily life.
The surrealist influence also shows in her use of bodily fragments. As with Bellmer, the body dismembers, recomposes according to a dreamlike logic. But Smith avoids fetishistic eroticization to favor a quasi-scientific approach. Her hearts, lungs, and stomachs in bronze or glass seem straight out of an anatomical amphitheater rather than a cabinet of libertine curiosities.
This surrealist lineage culminates in Smith’s recent works, notably her tapestries where human figures, animals, and cosmic elements mingle. These compositions evoke the mental landscapes of Yves Tanguy or the Ovidian metamorphoses of Max Ernst, while retaining the documentary precision that characterizes the artist. Smith achieves this remarkable synthesis: making surrealism a tool of scientific investigation rather than an excuse for poetic escape.
Smith’s genius lies in this ability to turn the surrealist heritage against itself. She borrows from the movement its techniques for representing the unconscious, but puts them at the service of a feminist exploration of the female body. Where the male surrealists projected their fantasies onto the female-object body, Smith makes the female body the territory of a subjective reconquest. Her anatomical surrealism thus becomes an instrument of liberation rather than alienation.
Body Architecture: space as a physiological metaphor
Kiki Smith’s work maintains a complex relationship with architecture that goes beyond the simple question of installation in space. Trained in the shadow of Tony Smith, a major figure of minimalist sculpture and trained architect, she inherits a particular sensitivity to questions of scale, proportion, and spatial occupation. But where her father conceived autonomous geometric volumes, she develops an organic approach that makes the human body the measure of all architecture.
This architectural dimension is first expressed in the way Smith conceives the exhibition space as a living organism. Her installations transform the gallery into a giant anatomical body, each artwork functioning as a specialized organ. The exhibition thus becomes a physiological metaphor: the viewer circulates through the arteries of an artistic circulatory system, discovers the cavities where the sculpture-organs nestle, and feels the pulse of a coherent bodily whole.
This analogy between architectural space and human anatomy finds its most literal expression in Smith’s public commissions. Her installation for the Eldridge Street synagogue in 2010 transforms the religious building into a mystical body. The stained glass windows she designed with architect Deborah Gans function as permeable membranes between the inside and the outside, between the sacred and the profane. Traditional architecture turns into a bodily envelope, both protective and vulnerable.
Smith pushes this logic further by conceiving some of her sculptures as habitable micro-architectures. Her life-size female figures are not only representations of the body but potential spaces for occupation. The viewer can identify with these anatomies, mentally inhabit them, and empathically experience their fragility or resistance. This projective dimension brings Smith’s art closer to phenomenological architecture, which prioritizes the sensible experience of space over its mere aesthetic contemplation.
The paternal influence is also revealed in Smith’s attention to questions of architectural materiality. Like Tony Smith, she favors industrial materials diverted from their primary function: bronze, steel, glass, concrete. But she charges them with an organic dimension that her father carefully avoided. Smith’s bronze evokes flesh rather than metal, the glass suggests membrane rather than mineral transparency.
This transformation of the paternal minimalist legacy into a bodily aesthetic reveals the full originality of Smith’s position. She retains the formal rigor of minimalism, its attention to the physical properties of materials, its rejection of narrative anecdote. But she reintroduces the human dimension that minimalism had evicted. Her sculptures function simultaneously as autonomous objects and as bodily projections.
Smith’s architecture culminates in her recent tapestries, where two-dimensional space unfolds as a habitable territory. These monumental works transform the wall into a landscape, creating immersive environments where the viewer can visually lose themselves. Smith achieves this paradoxical performance: to create architecture with textile means, to construct space with surface.
This dual approach, which conceives the body as architecture and architecture as bodily extension, reveals an original conception of contemporary sculpture. Smith does not merely occupy space; she transforms it into an extension of human corporeality. Her installations function as architectural prostheses, spatial amplifications of our fleshly presence in the world.
Smith’s architecture thus offers an alternative both to disembodied minimalism and gestural expressionism. She invents a middle path where built space and lived body nourish each other. This synthesis between architectural rigor and anatomical sensitivity constitutes one of Smith’s most original contributions to contemporary art.
The Laboratory of Abjection
At the heart of Smith’s artistic project lies this fascination for what Julia Kristeva calls abjection: that troubled zone where distinctions between clean and dirty, inside and outside, living and dead collapse. Smith transforms this psychoanalytic category into an aesthetic program, developing a poetics of the unclean that reveals the flaws in our civilized relationship with the body.
Her first sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s systematically explore this theme. Jars filled with imaginary bodily fluids, isolated organs floating in jars, human figures exuding their humors constitute a methodical inventory of everything our culture represses. Smith does not indulge in scatological complacency but proceeds with the rigor of an anatomist. Each work documents a particular aspect of our repressed animality.
This aesthetic of abjection finds its justification in the historical context of the AIDS epidemic. Smith, who lost her sister Beatrice and many artist friends, makes art a tool of resistance against the invisibilization of sick bodies. Her sculptures make visible what society prefers to ignore: the fragility of our immune defenses, the porosity of our bodily boundaries, the powerlessness of our medicine against certain viruses.
But Smith’s abjection goes beyond simple sociological testimony to question the foundations of our relationship to the feminine. When she sculpts these women who urinate, defecate, bleed, Smith reveals how much our culture aestheticizes the female body while concealing its biological functions. She practices a sort of physiological realism that deconstructs male fantasies about female purity.
This approach reaches its peak in works like “Pee Body” (1992) or “Train” (1993), where female figures engage in their natural needs without the slightest modesty. Smith is not seeking gratuitous scandal but demands for women the right to bodily imperfection. These sculptures function as manifestos: they proclaim that female beauty is not limited to male aesthetic canons.
Smith’s abjection also draws on Catholic religious imagery. Raised in this tradition, the artist reactivates the Christ-like symbolism of bodily suffering. Her crucified figures, her contemporary martyrs evoke Christian statuary while subverting it. Redemptive sacrifice becomes a simple anatomical fact, spiritual transcendence turns into carnal immanence.
This religious dimension of Smith’s abjection reveals the full ambiguity of her critical stance. Smith does not reject the Christian heritage but turns it against itself. She borrows from Catholicism its fascination with the suffering flesh but evacuates the promise of resurrection. Her abject bodies remain desperately earthly, deprived of any metaphysical consolation.
The recent evolution of Smith’s work towards more peaceful representations does not constitute a renunciation of abjection but its dialectical overcoming. Contemporary tapestries integrate the bodily dimension into larger cosmic compositions. Individual abjection melts into a generalized ecology where humans, animals, and plants share the same existential fragility.
This transformation reveals the true significance of Smith’s project. Beyond mere provocation, abjection functions as a tool of knowledge. It reveals the psychological and social mechanisms that govern our relationship to the body. By confronting us with our instinctive repulsions, Smith leads us to question the foundations of our civilized disgusts.
The Smithian abjection thus constitutes a form of disguised social criticism. By revealing what our culture represses, it exposes the contradictions of our democratic values. Can a society that claims gender equality continue to aestheticize the female body according to exclusively male criteria? This question runs throughout Smith’s work and gives it its political dimension.
The Alchemy of Materials
Smith’s artistic practice reveals an exceptional technical mastery that goes beyond mere artisanal virtuosity to become an autonomous expressive language. This woman, who was self-taught without an art school diploma, develops an empirical approach to materials that prioritizes experimentation over theory. Each medium becomes for her a territory of exploration, a laboratory to test the limits of bodily representation.
Engraving holds a central place in this technical framework. Smith sees it as “the source of all my work,” in her own words [2]. This ancestral technique allows her to explore the infinite possibilities of repetition, variation, and multiplication. Her series of etchings function like anatomical studies where each proof reveals a particular aspect of the original motif. Smithian engraving inherits from the tradition of scientific plates while diverting it towards subjective expression.
This serial approach, inherited from paternal teaching, finds its extension in sculpture. Smith creates her figures in bronze or wax as variations on recurring anatomical themes. Each piece constitutes a particular state of a broader research on the representation of the female body. This method evokes the photographic approach of Duane Michals or Joel-Peter Witkin, who also explore infinite variations around obsessive motifs.
Beeswax is one of Smith’s preferred materials. This organic substance literally translates the texture of human skin while retaining a strong symbolic dimension. Wax simultaneously evokes the fragility of the epidermis and the permanence of funerary embalming. Smith plays on this ambivalence to create figures situated on the boundary between life and death.
Bronze, a noble material of traditional statuary, undergoes a special treatment in Smith’s work that reveals unprecedented expressive potentials. Her patinas sometimes evoke putrid flesh, sometimes diseased epidermis. The artist diverts the nobility of bronze to explore the most prosaic aspects of bodily condition. This subversion of material hierarchies reveals all of Smith’s irony.
Glass, which she works notably in her installations for the Eldridge Street synagogue, becomes a metaphor for bodily transparency. Smith uses the optical properties of this material to create effects of superposition, fusion, and dissolution that evoke internal physiological processes. Smithian glass functions like a translucent skin that reveals the hidden mechanisms of the organism.
Contemporary tapestries mark a revolution in Smith’s technical approach. This textile technique, which she develops in collaboration with the Magnolia Editions workshops, allows her to integrate color into her artistic vocabulary. As she explains: “Color seemed too personal, too self-expressive… too frightening” [3]. Jacquard tapestries offer a compromise: they allow the use of color while maintaining the technical distance necessary for Smith’s objectivity.
This technical evolution reveals a constant in Smith’s approach: a refusal of total mastery. The artist favors techniques that retain a degree of unpredictability, that resist absolute control. This aesthetic of controlled accident links Smith to the abstract expressionists, notably Jackson Pollock, who also sought to channel unconscious forces through pictorial technique.
The diversity of Smith’s mediums reflects her expansive conception of contemporary sculpture. For her, sculpting is not limited to traditional modeling but encompasses all techniques capable of shaping matter. This multimedia approach brings Smith closer to conceptual artists while maintaining a craft attachment to the physical properties of materials.
Smith’s alchemy transforms industrial materials into bodily metaphors. She succeeds in this remarkable synthesis between technical innovation and artisanal tradition, between formal experimentation and personal expressiveness. This technical mastery serving a singular artistic vision constitutes one of the most remarkable aspects of Smith’s art.
Towards an Ecology of the Body
The recent evolution of her work marks a significant turning point that goes beyond mere stylistic maturation to constitute a true conceptual mutation. The artist, who had built her reputation on ruthless exploration of the human anatomy, gradually expands her field of investigation to embrace a global ecological vision where the human body is no longer just one element among others in a complex ecosystem.
This transformation begins in the mid-1990s, when Smith starts introducing animal figures into her sculptural bestiary. The dead crows of “Jersey Crows” (1995), victims of industrial pesticides, mark a decisive turning point. The artist no longer confines herself to exploring the fragility of the human body but extends her reflection to all living beings. This evolution coincides with the ecological awareness of the 1990s and demonstrates Smith’s ability to grasp contemporary mutations.
The recent tapestries crystallize this expanded ecological vision. These monumental works deploy textile cosmogonies where humans, animals, plants, and mineral elements coexist in a precarious balance. Smith develops there an aesthetics of interconnection that evokes contemporary ecological theories on species interdependence. Each tapestry functions as a miniature artistic ecosystem.
This ecological approach transforms Smith’s view of the female body. Her recent figures are no longer isolated in their anatomical suffering but integrated into natural environments that protect and nourish them. The Smithian woman emerges from her victim status to become a partner in a broader cosmic dialogue. This evolution demonstrates a progressive reconciliation with the corporeal dimension.
The introduction of astrological references in recent works participates in this ecological vision. Smith reactivates an analogical thought that establishes correspondences between the bodily microcosm and the stellar macrocosm. This approach, which may seem anachronistic in the scientific era, actually reveals a quest for meaning in the face of the contemporary environmental crisis. Smithian astrology functions as a poetic metaphor of our cosmic belonging.
This ecological dimension finds its fullest expression in the recent installations, notably the one on Hydra Island in 2019. Smith develops a contextual approach that takes into account the geographical and cultural particularities of the exhibition site. Smith’s art interacts with the Mediterranean landscape, enriched by Aegean light, and imbued with local mythology. This contextual sensitivity reveals a maturation of her installation approach.
Smith’s ecology goes beyond simple environmental sensitivity to question our Western relationship with nature. By reactivating archaic mythological figures such as sirens, harpies, and hybrid creatures, the artist reconnects us to premodern modes of thought that did not separate the human from the natural. This symbolic archaeology acts as an implicit critique of contemporary technoscientific rationality.
This conceptual evolution is accompanied by a transformation in the critical reception of Smith’s work. Commentators no longer focus exclusively on the feminist body art dimension but explore the ecological, spiritual, and cosmological ramifications of her recent work. Smith achieves this delicate performance: renewing her artistic approach without renouncing her fundamental obsessions.
Smithian ecology thus proposes an original synthesis between political engagement and contemporary spirituality. It avoids the pitfalls of simplistic ecological activism as well as new age esotericism to develop a complex vision of our place within the living world. This conceptual maturity confers a prophetic dimension to her recent works that goes beyond simple artistic creation.
Smith’s art thus evolves toward a form of practical wisdom that reconciles body and cosmos, individual and collective, local and universal. This remarkable synthesis between anatomical precision and ecological vision constitutes one of Smith’s most original contributions to contemporary art. It invents a middle path between narcissistic introspection and militant engagement, between the particular and the universal.
Kiki Smith’s work resists both hasty categorization and ideological co-optation. This singular artist, who has traversed forty years of creation without ever abandoning her initial radicalism, leaves us a body of work with remarkable coherence despite apparent contradictions. From the anatomical abjection of her beginnings to the mystical ecology of her recent tapestries, Smith maintains a demanding standard that makes each work a laboratory of experimentation on the limits of bodily representation.
Her genius lies in this ability to transform artistic heritage into a tool of contemporary knowledge. She borrows from surrealism its techniques for exploring the unconscious, from minimalist architecture its formal rigor, from Catholicism its symbolism of redemptive suffering, but turns them around to serve a feminist and ecological vision of the world. This cultural alchemy gives Smith’s art a semantic richness that explains its international resonance.
Smith’s topicality also lies in her capacity for anticipation. When she sculpts in the 1980s these failing bodies ravaged by illness, she foresees the mutations in our relationship with the living that the Covid-19 epidemic will reveal. When she develops her ecological vision in the 2010s, she anticipates contemporary debates on the Anthropocene and the collapse of biodiversity. This visionary dimension makes Kiki Smith’s art a tool of sociological foresight as much as an object of aesthetic contemplation.
This lingering question implicitly posed by her entire body of work remains: how to inhabit a fragile body in a hostile world? This inquiry spans epochs and civilizations, but Smith gives it a contemporary urgency that reveals the aporias of our techno-scientific modernity. By confronting us with our repressed animality, she leads us to question the foundations of our supposed humanity. This major critical function ensures that Smith’s art endures beyond the fashions of contemporary artistic trends.
- France Culture, radio interview, 2019, cited in NAD NOW, “Kiki Smith, Wild Woman”, July 2020.
- Alain Elkann Interviews, interview with Kiki Smith, December 2018.
- Claire Barliant, “If you can outlive most men, all of a sudden you can be venerated, an interview with Kiki Smith”, Apollo Magazine, October 2019.
