an ode to love and freedom
Until March 5, 2023, the Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse presents an unprecedented exhibition on the years 1980-1900 by Niki de Saint Phalle, a second part of his career marked by the societal commitment of the artist.
We were waiting for him since his son announce, The big day is finally here. Until March 5, 2023, the museum-Frac Occitanie Toulouse presents “Niki de Saint Phalle. The 1980s and 1990s: Art in Freedom”, with the support of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation, the MAMAC in Nice and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris). This first major exhibition in France, since the retrospective at the Grand Palais in 2014, deals with an unprecedented aspect of the work of the Franco-American artist: the second part of his career. Besides the Tarot Garden, the project of a lifetime, the event highlights the commitment of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) to minorities and her desire to spread art in everyone’s daily life.
All the feelings of life in one exhibition
“ The exhibition talks about joy, the spectacular, but also about illness, acceptance and mixes all the feelings of life », describes Annabelle Ténèze, director of the Abattoirs and curator of the exhibition alongside Lucia Pesapane. Snakeshearts, skulls, phallic shapes, dragons, devils, angels… In all, around 200 works invaded the ground floor and basement of Les Abattoirs.
After being greeted by a wall of Babes inflatables, the visitor discovers the great nave transformed for the occasion into a garden of sculptures. From the Stravinsky Fountain, near the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Gila monster, designed for children near San Diego (United States), via the Loch Ness, who left Nice exceptionally after its restoration, all these monumental sculptures remind us that Niki de Saint Phalle is the first female artist to have carried out the most commissions in the public space.
An artist entrepreneur
In the first thematic room, visitors explore the bestiary teeming with the artist’s iconography. Alongside everyday animals such as the duck, we find the killer whale and the rhinoceros, but also fantastic and mythological animals. This space also looks back on the launch in New York of her perfume in 1982, in the effigy of her totem animal, the snake. This crazy bet aims to realize the dream of Niki de Saint Phalle and to build the Tarot garden (started in 1978), while being financially independent. With the presentation of her sculpture for perfume, the exhibition shows an important facet of the artist: that of the entrepreneur.
A cathedral building
It took twenty years of work to make Niki de Saint Phalle’s dream come true and create the Tarot Garden, this monumental set of sculptures, both a place of art and life, on the scale of the landscape of Tuscany (Italy) in which it is located. The exhibition highlights the multiple references to works from different eras and cultures such as Gaudi’s Park Güell and the Postman Cheval’s ideal palace (which she visited in the 1950s), but also the mannerist gardens, the cathedral of Siena or even the heads and jaguars olmecs. The symbols of the cards of the 22 major arcana of the Tarot of Marseille then become polychrome sculptures, worked in ceramics, mosaics, fountains… From the models to the final sculptures, including the lithographs, all the research work and creative process of the artist is revealed, featuring Niki de Saint Phalle as a cathedral builder.
Putting his notoriety and his art at the service of society
If Niki de Saint Phalle’s precocious feminism no longer needs to be proven, the exhibition also highlights the artist’s humanism through her commitment to the most fragile minorities. Faced with the violence of racist America in the 1990s, in her works she defends the right to abortion, represents heroes from the black community and criticizes the carrying of arms.
I am an outsider, I come from all cultures, said Niki de Saint Phalle
One of the causes for which she is particularly involved is the fight against AIDS, following the death of many of her relatives. Prevention posters, television appearances, cartoons, an ode to condoms… Niki de Saint Phalle met her notoriety and her art in the service of society to show another way of making love and transform the violent discourse on the disease.
This cause particularly speaks to the artist who suffers in particular from immunodeficiency. In the years 1978-1979, she had already produced a whole series of sculptures entitled Skinnies. In opposition to Girls round and full of life, these works mark the presence of emptiness, air and oxygen which the artist began to lack following his lung problems.
In a room dedicated to self-writing, the event returns the manuscript of My secret (1994) and the revelation of her father’s incest, of which she was a victim when she was eleven years old. The artist’s characteristic round calligraphy blends with the drawings that punctuate this intimate story that she shares in support of incest victims and children: ” If I had done it before, no one would have believed me. »
Make art accessible to everyone
Finally, the exhibition highlights another little-known part of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work: artist’s furniture. Without distinction between art and furniture, she wants to spread art in everyone’s life and make it accessible to all. From the 1980s, she expanded the range of furniture she created: armchairs, tables, mirrors, vases, chandeliers, tapestries and chairs inspired by her personal life or elements from mythologies around the world. Thus, she makes a bench where she represents herself with her grandson or lamps embodying the Egyptian goddess Thouéris.
its opening last October, more than 5 Since4,000 people have already visited “Niki de Saint Phalle. The 1980s and 1990s: Art in Freedom”. Whether one finds the works of the self-taught artist kitsch or too colorful, no one can dispute the richness of the universe of Niki de Saint Phalle nor the resonance and the force of the discourse of his works engaged in today’s world. After the success of Unicorn Lady, this general public exhibition is a new event that will certainly conquer the hearts of Toulouse residents and the Occitanie region.