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Niki de Saint Phalle (French pronunciation: [niki d(ə) sɛ̃ fal]; born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle; 29 October 1930 – 21 May 2002) was a French-American sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books.
- Overview
- Early life
- Tir paintings
- Nanas
- Tarot Garden and other large-scale projects
- Activism
- Later life
- Legacy
Niki de Saint Phalle, (born October 29, 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France—died May 21, 2002, La Jolla, California, U.S.), French-American artist whose diverse practice encompassed a wide variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, performance, and film. Her work explores femininity, gender oppression, violence, and joy.
Saint Phalle was born the second of five children to American Jeanne Jacqueline and French aristocrat Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle. She lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine, an affluent suburb just outside Paris, until the age of three, when her family moved to New York City. They spent summers in France. She had a fraught childhood, suffering beatings from her mother and sexual abuse from her father. She revealed later that her father had raped her when she was age 11. Saint Phalle showed a rebellious spirit early on, being expelled from two Roman Catholic schools and from the Brearley School, a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of New York City. In her teens she began modeling and appeared in such magazines as French Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar.
At age 18, Saint Phalle married aspiring musician Harry Mathews, who later became an experimental writer. Together they had two children: Laura in 1951 and Philip in 1955. The family moved to Europe in 1952, traveling frequently around the continent over the next few years. Both Saint Phalle and Mathews, however, were having affairs. In 1953 she had a mental breakdown and was admitted into a clinic in Nice, France. There Saint Phalle devoted herself to painting, finding recovery by providing “an organic structure” to her life.
In 1960 Saint Phalle and Mathews separated, and later that year she moved in with Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, known especially for his kinetic artworks. They would collaborate frequently and married in 1971. Although Saint Phalle had no formal artistic training, she had ambitious concepts and a dedication to her craft. In 1961, with the help of T...
In 1964 Saint Phalle began working on a series of new sculptures inspired by her pregnant friend Clarice Rivers, wife of American artist Larry Rivers. Saint Phalle called the new sculptures Nanas, French slang for a young woman, akin to such terms as chick or broad. The Nanas are a bold departure from the violence of her Tirs. They are sculptures o...
Saint Phalle continued to explore large-scale projects. In 1972 she completed The Golem in Jerusalem, a playground in the shape of a spotted monster with three tongues that serve as slides. In 1978 she broke ground on Tarot Garden, a 14-acre (5.6-hectare) garden in the southern Tuscan region of Italy. It features enormous sculptures depicting the major arcana, the 22 trump cards in a tarot deck. She funded the project by launching and selling a signature perfume and through donations from friends. The sculpture garden’s intricate mosaics and biomorphic forms were particularly inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona. Saint Phalle spent nearly 20 years constructing Tarot Garden, opening it to the public in 1998. Meanwhile, in 1982 she moved into The Empress, one of her Tarot Garden sculptures that served as her home for several years.
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A vocal activist, Saint Phalle used her art to address issues including climate change, civil rights, and gun violence. Deeply affected by the deaths of many of her friends due to AIDS, she became involved in campaigns to raise awareness of the disease and to offer prevention strategies. Saint Phalle collaborated with Swiss immunologist Silvio Bara...
In 1993 Saint Phalle moved to La Jolla, California, where she continued to create sculptures using mirrors, glass, and stones in place of paint. Beginning in 2000 she donated about 1,000 sculptures and graphic works to the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France. She died in 2002 from respirato...
During her lifetime Saint Phalle enjoyed relative fame in Europe but not in the United States. Her first major exhibition in the U.S. was held at MoMA PS1, an art centre in Queens, New York, nearly twenty years after her death. As Johanna Fateman noted in her review of the exhibition for Artforum, Saint Phalle’s “Nanas were first and foremost symbo...
Finally opened to the public in 1998, the garden features 22 massive sculptures, some almost 50 feet high. Based on cards from the tarot deck, including the Empress, the High Priestess, and the Magician, the sculptures are brightly painted, with mosaics of glass, mirrors, and stones.
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Oct 29, 2023 · Niki de Saint Phalle, Hon, 1966, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. ArchDaily. In 1966, in Stockholm, Sweden an incredible art event occurred about which not even the press present at the launch knew what to say. A gigantic version of a strange form of sculpture known as Nana Statues was to be found at the Moderna Museet entitled Hon-en-Katedrall.
An image of Niki de Saint Phalle's Big Head (1970) sculpture serves as a colorful slipcase for an exhibition held at two Tokyo locations. Exhibition curator Yoko Masuda opened a gallery of Saint Phalle's artwork called Space Niki, which eventually became The Niki Museum in Nasu Forest (1994–2009).
Mar 11, 2021 · Mar 11–Sep 6, 2021. MoMA PS1. Exhibition. From the very outset of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930‒2002) defied artistic conventions, creating works that were overtly feminist, performative, collaborative, and monumental.
May 21, 2002 · Niki de Saint Phalle. French-American Painter, Sculptor, Performance, Conceptual, and Installation Artist. Born: October 29, 1930 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. Died: May 21, 2002 - La Jolla, California, USA. Movements and Styles: Nouveau Réalisme. , Feminist Art. , Performance Art. , Conceptual Art. , Modern Sculpture.
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