Niki de Saint Phalle

(France-United States of America, 29/10/1930 - 21/05/2002)

Encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, performance, architecture and public art, Saint Phalle’s audacious innovation allowed her to engage deeply with social and political themes central to the Feminist art movement and forge a unique artist language where intimacy and monumentality meet.

Born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, her childhood was spent between France and the United States where she initially pursued a career in fashion modeling. Following a period of psychological crisis in 1953, she was institutionalised in Nice where she found herself freed from the confines of domestic labour and turned to art as a process of self-reconstruction. It was here that Saint Phalle began to synthesise the elements of Art Brut, Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism with her own distinctive voice through her use of unconventional materials and performative gestures.

Her first major body of work, the Tirs (Shooting Paintings, 1961-64), positioned her at the forefront of the Nouveau Réalisme movement and constituted a radical redefinition of artistic authorship, transforming aggression into aesthetic creation and implicating the viewer as both witness and participant. From this point onwards, she pursued an ever more ambitious integration of art and environment and, as she continued to explore the role of women in society, her practice expanded into large-scale sculptural works, such as the celebrated Nanas which embody a feminist reimagining of the female form as autonomous, powerful and joyous.

As an early advocate for HIV/AIDS education, in 1986 she wrote and illustrated the book AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, which explains how the virus is transmitted and encourages compassion for those suffering from infection. It has since been translated into five languages and distributed to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren around the world. An enduring belief in art’s capacity to heal and to confront the complexities of human experience led her to continue using her art for activism, producing a number of illustrations addressing social, political, environmental and gender related issues.

Image: Niki de Saint Phalle, Tarot Garden (1978-98). Pescia Fiorentina, Capalbio, Italy.