Artist provocateur: Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao
|
Version 0 of 1. “Very early I decided to become a hero,” Niki de Saint Phalle once declared. “Who would I be? George Sand? Joan of Arc? Napoleon in petticoats?” In fact, she became none of them. A woman who spent her life with a paintbrush in one hand and a 22-calibre rifle in the other, Saint Phalle is revealed in a new exhibition to have been both an artist and a warrior unlike any before her. Related: Niki de Saint Phalle artworks at the Guggenheim – in pictures The retrospective which opened at at Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum on Friday is one of the most comprehensive journeys through the artworks of Saint Phalle, who was a pioneering feminist in both her art and her life and remained outspoken, radical and creative up until her death in 2002. The vast exhibition spans six decades of her life, featuring almost 200 works from her early self-portrait and her famous shooting paintings, where she would annihilate the canvas with bullets, to the Nanas sculptures (nana is French slang for a woman) and experimental films. Moving through the chronologically arranged galleries, viewers encounter works that deal explicitly with violence and society’s suppression of women, paintings and sculptures that explicitly challenge the patriarchy in their defiantly unconventional depiction of brides, prostitutes, mothers and goddesses. Her birth sculptures made in the early 60s are one such provocative example. Unforgiving and unidealised sculptures of women with a baby between their severed thighs, they are moulded from wire but also small dolls, planes, fake flowers and other objects Saint Phalle felt illustrated the complex joy and horror of birth. The exhibition itself is a collaboration between Saint Phalle’s own granddaughter Bloum Cardenas and curators Camille Morineau and Álvaro Rodriguez Fominaya. For Cardenas, who grew up very close to her grandmother and for whom Saint Phalle’s artworks and sculptures were her own personal playground as a child, this exhibition is an opportunity to redefine the artist’s unique and yet often dismissed place in 20th-century art. “In so many ways, she is a pioneer of avant-garde and no one sees her like that,” said Cardenas. “There’s been a lot of battles to get to this point because she was not wanted in French institutions.” Acknowledging Saint Phalle as an equally American and European artist is central to the retrospective. Although she was born in France, she spent decades in New York and California, where she lived out her final years, and overtly tackled American issues such as gun control and civil rights in the 60s in her artworks. The exhibition not only shows Saint Phalle’s numerous shooting paintings – considered scandalous at the time – but also footage of her in action, standing before her canvases where she would plaster on small pots and bags of paint and then shoot at them mercilessly with a shotgun till they bled paint. Saint Phalle said in 1961 that she would shoot at everything, starting with “Daddy, all men, short men, tall men, important men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the church … all men, daddy, myself.” At the heart of the exhibit are the Nanas, perhaps Saint Phalle’s most famous works, created in the early 1960s and often credited as for ever redefining the depiction of women in sculpture. Vast, curvaceous sculptured bodies – some towering more than 5 metres high – with large breasts and splayed limbs, and often with black skin, they are all a celebration and powerful statement on the female form. “The way people see the Nanas today – I’ve never agreed with this joyful interpretation,” says Cardenas. “For me, it is an army of women coming to take over the world. People forget that all these colours in mid-60s Paris were in really bad taste; pop hadn’t conquered the world and America hadn’t completely taken over. And at a time when Twiggy is how you’re supposed to look, she comes with these women who have breasts in your face, they are curvy, they flaunt their sex in your face, in every position. They are powerful, they are themselves.” Indeed, a challenging of the patriarchy, which she was a victim of throughout her life, is a continuous theme throughout the retrospective. Saint Phalle, born into an French aristocratic family and the daughter of a banker, was sexually abused by her father and was the victim of rape, issues that manifest themselves in conflicting ways in her artworks. Perhaps most pointed is the film titled Daddy, which she made after the death of her father and has been restored for the exhibition. It tells story of a girl who gets abused by a father and takes revenge by turning him into a woman, humiliating him and eventually killing him. It is, as Cardenas, acknowledges, “complex and explosive, even now … it was a confused way of dealing with lots of emotions, more like an exorcism for her.” Much of Saint Phalle’s legacy lies in her championing of public artworks and she was one of the first women to make her mark on public spaces across the world. The retrospective dedicates a room to these artworks, displaying both models and photographs of works that still stand across the world. From sculptures in Jerusalem to fountains in Paris and totems in a California park, the works were her way of taking possession and re-owning the male-dominated public space. They were driven, she once said, by “the delusion of grandeur to prove that a chick can make the most important things of her time”. Saint Phalle worked on her biggest project, inspired by Gaudi’s Park Guell in Barcelona, until her death. The Tarot Garden in the Tuscan hills features a series of monumental sculptures based on the 22 symbols of tarot cards, gigantic figures and towers covered in mirrors, ceramics and stones. They can be lived in and Cardenas recalls many summers spent among these astonishing structures, sited where they still stand today. Her role as an artist and a provocateur defined her. As one of the earliest champions of Aids awareness, the exhibition finishes with two drawings casting scathing criticism on the regime of George W Bush. Surveying the exhibition, Cardenas is triumphant. “Niki was always a strong presence and influence in my life,” she said. “Twelve years she’s gone and I’m still trying to make her proud. I think our generation understands her much better than the ones before and one of my most important missions after she passed away was to get younger people to engage with her work. We get it in a way most people of her generation never did.” |