Notes on Kiki Smith's Fall/Winter - Brief Article

In the twenty years that Kiki Smith has been exhibiting her multimedia work, she has explored the body from inside to outside, constantly conflating the borders between the two. A Virgin Mary with flayed skin, a disembodied stomach, a wax figure with exposed muscles, a porcelain pelvis on a pedestal, truncated hands and feet--all are part of her extensive repertoire. Lately, in Of Her Nature, her recent one-person exhibition presented at PaceWildenstein in New York, she has produced an installation based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, in which girls with baskets accompany wolves and a life-size girl morphs into a werewolf, as well as tissue-paper sculptures of girls cradling cats or mice.

A recent work, titled Fall/Winter, not included in the exhibition, but very much in line with it conceptually, demonstrates Smith's continued fascination with the body (in this case, her body) and its relationship to animals. The two self-portraits are black-and-white photogravures with acquatint etching and drypoint. In each of the images, Smith poses in three-quarter profile with a squirrel in her lap. In Fall she sits against a white background, wearing a white cap, and a dark smock; in Winter she sits against a black background, her hair disheveled beneath a similar cap, wearing white. The latter is more grim, brooding, and "gothic," while the former is more prim and static. In Fall there is an optimism, evidenced by the perky squirrel, which is lacking in Winter, where the squirrel seems to have been transformed into a rat, and the sitter into a witch-like figure. By offering up the last two seasons (there is no Spring/Summer), Smith underscores the fragility of life and the imminence of death. Form fol lows content here: these are delicate, intimate works built up out of vaporous lines and obsessively repetitive cross-hatchings.

The formal source for the work is a Hans Holbein painting titled Lady with Squirrel and Magpie, dating from 1527. The Holbein portrait also shows a young woman in a white cap in three-quarter profile, but with two popular domesticated animals of the period: a magpie (on her shoulder) and a squirrel (in her lap). Considering Smith's long-time enchantment with animals, the appeal of Holbein's portrait seems quite evident. As she explained in a 1992 interview, "When I was a kid I'd go find dead animals, like little squirrels or birds, and I'd put little necklaces around their necks and make little caskets, making them into mummies. I'd dress them up and I'd put all my treasures in with them and bury them." Animals have played a prominent role in her oeuvre; for instance, in 1995, she exhibited Jersey Crows (twenty-seven silicon-bronze birds); in 1997, a suite of deer caught in headlights; and in 1999, portraits of girls with hedgehogs. She is particularly drawn to animals' vulnerability, and here to children's as well, highlighted by her rendering of herself as a demure, innocent youth transformed into its dismal doppelganger, In examining youth and the domestication of animals, she aims both into macabre memento marl.

Maura Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts. New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on Gustave Courbet's images of lesbians and sexual politics in Second Empire France. She also writes reviews of contemporary art for Art in America.

Kiki Smith's Fall/Winter is the fourth in a series of limited edition prints that artists have contributed to support College Art Association's Professional Development Fellowship Program for Artists and Art Historians.

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