Kiki Smith

This presentation, which marks Smith’s first solo show in New York City in six years, debuts a series of new bronzes, drawings, and prints produced in recent years alongside sculptural works created during the late 1980s and early 1990s—including a large-scale installation that has not been exhibited in the U.S. for over 30 years. Together, these works sustain a dialogue across three-and-a-half decades of Smith’s practice—an ongoing conversation between past and present—centering on transience and the fragility and joy of embodiment.

The exhibition also includes several important historical works by Smith dating to the early 1990s, the period in which she began solidifying her artistic vocabulary. Presented in dialogue with the bronze birds is a site-responsive installation consisting of papier-mâché figures suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. Large monochromatic panels of painted red paper transform the tonality of the room, contrasting with the pallid figures whose shell-like forms appear like bodily envelopes hanging in space. The work makes references to St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of the separation of matter and form. Smith’s installation, made during the AIDS crisis, has not been exhibited in New York since it was first created. It is presented alongside other earlier works in both paper and bronze, including her visceral sculpture Untitled (Meat Arm) (1992).

125 Newbury’s presentation also features several works in various print media. Printmaking is central to Smith’s practice, and its technical processes echo the way she creates her bronze reliefs. Printing, like casting, is a process of transfer. In her cast works, Smith begins with drawing—literally incising the graphic markers into a clay surface. She then covers the entire clay surface with wax, creating a cast of the drawing in wet clay. Other highlights in the exhibition include a new series of bird drawings that seem to alight almost miraculously on the diaphanous surfaces of silk tissue paper.

Smith, who had her last major solo show with Pace in New York in 2019, has been represented by the gallery since 1994—Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth celebrates the nearly four-decade friendship between the artist and Arne Glimcher.