Thankfully, I have no street harrassment to report this weekend. Instead, I just managed to catch Tate Liverpool’s Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective before it closes on the 5th.
I had heard of Niki through articles in Sunday supplements, but had never seen much of her work. If this exhibition is touring, then I advise anyone reading to go and take a look. Niki had a long and varied career in art, involving many different styles. She is most famous for her “Nanas” (pictured), large, stylised goddess-women, shown in poses ranging from proud, pregnant to playful. They are typically sculpted in papier mache on wire armatures and painted in bright, assertive colours. I like the Nanas. There is something very cheerful and comforting at the same time about them.
Niki is also known for her “tirs”. These were relief sculptures with concealed pouches of wet paint and foodstuffs within, which were released when the artist, or one of her accomplices, shot at them with a .22 rifle, also on display at the Tate. The tirs developed from being quite abstract to being astute political statements, dripping with their own “blood”. Niki was opposed to the imperialist regime in her native France, its treatment of the North African colonies and the far-Right organisations that were proliferating when she made these works.
Coming between these parts of her career were her “bride” sculptures, and this was when she started working predominantly with the idea of womanhood, feminity and female experience. The brides, with their wide, distorted bodies made of lace and bits of broken doll, conrast with the exuberant Nanas. They and some of the tirs are the most explicitly feminist pieces on display, although Niki never identified as a feminist artist, perhaps because she had managed to sculpt and shoot her way into elite artists’ groups and did not wish to be marginalised.
I am no art critic, so cannot really describe all of what was on display adequately. What I left the exhibition with was a huge admiration for Niki de Saint Phalle, her huge and vibrant personality, her talent for melding the aesthetic and the meaningful, her ideas and her energy.
It’s a great exhibition, you should go!
