Artist: Kiki Smith
Exhibition Title: “Kiki Smith. Woven Worlds”
Venue: Petrović Castle, MCAM
Dates: November 26, 2024 – February 21, 2025
Curators: Milica Bezmarević, Mirjana Dušić, Ljuba Jovićević
The solo exhibition of American artist Kiki Smith, titled “Kiki Smith. Woven Worlds” will be her first exhibition in Montenegro. It will feature works spanning her decades-long creative practice, including pieces focusing on the human body from various perspectives, artworks centered on animals, fables, and nature, and her most recent works from the past few years. This exhibition, following its display at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen, Germany, was created in close collaboration with the artist and designed as a cohesive whole, incorporating tapestries, sculptures, prints, and drawings.
Kiki Smith is an internationally acclaimed artist with a career spanning more than four decades. Her multidisciplinary approach—ranging from sculpture and drawing to tapestry and printmaking—explores themes related to the relationship between humans and nature. Her unique and inventive artistic vision offers a completely different way of viewing the human body and physical presence. In the 1980s, through a radical approach to figurative art, she deconstructed its tradition by creating works inspired by human organs and using unconventional materials. Her later practice incorporates animal and natural motifs, embedded in intense mythological or fairy-tale narratives. Life, Death, and Resurrection are themes in many of her installations and sculptures. In these works, Smith references the creation of archetypal female models and their demystification, each interpretation drawing inspiration from the allegorical dimension of reality.
Between 2011 and 2017, inspired by the monumental Apocalypse tapestry series from Angers, France—part of UNESCO’s World Heritage—Kiki Smith created a cycle of 12 tapestries, nine of which, including the first one, Sky, will be on display. The first three tapestries (Earth, Sky, and Underground) form a series on the four basic elements—earth, air, water, and fire. The remaining nine, closely related to the same theme, reflect Smith’s focus on the fusion of animal, plant, and human worlds.
The exhibition will also feature her monumental sculpture Rapture (2001), part of a series where Smith develops a mystical cohesion of human and animal identities, with female figures emerging from animal bodies. By connecting various contexts—mythological, symbolic, or literary—Smith presents the female figure emerging from Nature itself, reborn, as a kind of resurrection.
With a series of smaller sculptures, reliefs, prints, and drawings, where different narratives and iconographic concepts intertwine to depict a profound synthesis between humans and animals, this exhibition provides a cross-section of Smith’s entire body of work and insight into her unique art, which stems from her deep personal understanding of Nature and our intertwined identities woven into it, evolving together.