KIKI SMITH – MOMENTS OF CLARITY
2012-11-19For the exhibition Moments of Clarity Kiki Smith has created a group of new works of art that examine the issue of sources and communication of artistic inspiration. The American artist, who has been regarded as one of the great contemporary artists since the late 1980s, examines the theme from all sides in the wide variety of media characteristic of her.
Ideas are often as stubborn as shy animals. They retreat when you reach for them, won’t come when you call, and refuse to be lured at all. But at some point, without your having done anything, they are abruptly there, calm and quiet, yet suddenly clear and sharp. Smith has already explored the essential experience of such moments of clarity in earlier works under a decidedly feminine perspective. In Smith’s Munich show, this image recurs in a more universal form. Here, light serves as a metaphor for illumination, enlightenment, the breath of life per se.
One of the show’s recurrent motifs, which succinctly sums up the notion of the happy idea, is the light bulb, for Smith is fascinated by its archaic, simple, energetic, yet simultaneously fragile form. The rows of girls and women lined up beneath the rays of paper lanterns in Assembly have the facial features of the artist’s friends and assistants. They tell us that the artistic idea is not simply a gift of some sort, but has to be worked for by co-existing with one another in society. This also includes the possibility of failure, for which Smith has invented a concentrated image – that of the broken Lightbulbs made of blindingly white porcelain and manufactured at the Nymphenburg porcelain factory.
Opposite – Visitor, 2012
Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013
Barbara Gross Galerie
Theresienstr. 56, Hof 1
80333 Munich
Germany
