Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith
25 November 2021 – 28 January 2022
Exhibition concept: Branko Franceschi
Curator: Branko Franceschi
The Croatian public will have the first-ever opportunity to view, in their national museum institutions, twenty-one works by the internationally renowned American artist Kiki Smith. Thanks to inventive and unencumbered technical procedures Smith has promoted through her multidisciplinary practice during the 1980s, she managed to singlehandedly change the canons in which human body and corporeality in general were traditionally presented. This is especially true of the motif of a woman and what has generally been considered the field of female creativity in art, such as motifs related to dreams, dream visions, the magical, conjuring and intuitive relationship towards reality, and nature in particular. Kiki Smith’s works at the NMMU are presented alongside the works of fourteen Croatian female artists from the museum collection, created over a period of one hundred years, which we find resonant and congruous with Kiki Smith’s work. It is an exhibition set-up that connects two art scenes and cultures, USA and Croatia, in time and space. The well-known Croatian female artists will introduce this international art star, practically unknown in Croatia outside the art scene, to the local public and cultural discourse. In addition to the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, the exhibition will also be showcased in the Museum of Fine Arts in Split (11 February 2022 - 27 March 2022), and each museum will present works of Croatian female artists from their respective collections. The exhibition catalogue will accompany both set-ups, the distribution of which will enable foreign audiences, who are drawn to Kiki Smith’s charisma, to get to know the century of prolific work of Croatian female artists. It is a beautiful position of solidarity and sisterhood by vocation that transcends existing global structures of power and fame relations.
Croatian Artist in exhibition set-up at NMMU: Nevenka Arbanas, Biserka Baretić, Jagoda Buić, Vlasta Delimar, Ina Drutter, Marta Ehrlich, Ksenija Kantoci, Nives Kavurić Kurtović, Milena Lah, Sofija Naletilić Penavuša, Vesna Popržan, Slava Raškaj, Nasta Rojc, Edita Schubert
Biography of the artist
Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve the body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing and textiles. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms and the human nervous system as well as by using unusual materials. Her later practice includes animal motifs, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of her installations and sculptures, the frequent topos of which are themes of gender with an emphasis on the construction of archetypal female types and situations. Her interpretation of motifs along with cultural references is inspired with the oneiric dimension of reality.
Kiki Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: People Who Shape Our World”. Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.
Translated by Robertina Tomić
Photo: From the Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith exhibition set up at the NMMU. Goran Vranić ©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb