Kiki Smith

The exhibition Woven Worlds comprises over 50 works by Kiki Smith, among them jacquard weavings and their layouts, detail-filled collaged drawings as well as sculptures. Included in this presentation is “Sperm piece” (1991) by the artist, a work from Moderna Museet’s collection that consists of over 700 glass parts spread out across the floor.

In this selection of works, Smith focuses our gaze on nature. Through intimate studies and fabulous fantasies, her weavings are populated by wolves, delicate butterflies, and shadowy bats. In the large-scale tapestries, measuring almost 300 x 200 cm, Smith adds silver thread to create a shimmering world of details. The layouts that the tapestries are based on are almost as large, consisting of collage in several layers, while her sculptures vary in material – from bronze with inlaid gemstones to porcelain with graphite.

Born in 1954, Smith has returned time and again throughout her career to the theme of the body and its internal organs. In “Woven Worlds”, we find an artist who turns her gaze outward – where the relationship between human, animal, and nature stands at the center as a cosmic totality.

“Art is just a way to think, Smith has said, and the exhibition allows us to truly follow her thoughts – how she reconfigures, develops, and populates her visual idiom,” says Elisabeth Millqvist, Director of Moderna Museet Malmö.

Smith is constantly exploring new techniques. The tapestries in the exhibition are created with computerised jacquard looms that make possible a complex color palette through a large number of warp threads. Smith compares machine weaving to printmaking, a way to duplicate motifs and create variations in editions.

Since the 1970s, Smith’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Haus der Kunst in Munich. “Woven Worlds” came into being through a close collaboration with the artist and on the initiative of Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Germany and curator Jutta Mattern. The exhibition has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro.

At Moderna Museet Malmö, “Woven Worlds” becomes a part of the museum’s ongoing investigation of artists who use varying entry points as they engage in questions of environment, nature, and transition.

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