Before we arrived I read most of a huge catalog of the work of Niki de St. Phalle. She sounded completely nuts, and her work looked like that of a dilettante, embraced and protected from the world by wealth and privilege.
Her show was huge, and expansive, displaying works from several phases of her prolific career.
First came the assemblages of found objects, although in a video of an interview, and various descriptions she said that she bought them.
Then there were the first female figures.
The female characters morphed into the Nanas, oversized, joyous female figures, usually dancing or floating, with small heads.
From the Nanas we went to the shooting phase, where the artist assembled collages of various obejcts, and attached containers of paint, over hwich she painted plaster. The paint containers were then shot by a gun, by the artist, a gunman, or others.
One was reminiscent of Guernica, a response to the Cuban missle crisis and other events at the time.
There were a collection of large installation pieces, and videos of outdoor installations, one of which was a Nana large enough to contain a complete, functioning one bedroom house. These included models of various installations, such as a children's playground, with a red slide.
Then it was back to reality, and lunch.
So what did we think? She was undeniably an artist, with a distinct voice, point of view and objective.
No comments:
Post a Comment