Pace Prints is pleased to present Kiki Smith, an exhibition highlighting a selection of the artist’s diverse work in print, on view February 28-April 6. This exhibition runs concurrent with Smith’s show Murmur at Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street.
Kiki Smith’s work focuses on the human body as well as nature, incorporating images of birds, animals, flowers, and the cosmos. She often forms a narrative within the work, drawing inspiration from myths and fairy tales, albeit from feminine perspectives.
Highlighted in the exhibition is Smith’s Sitting with a Snake (2007), a chimerical image, where Smith innovatively printed on silk fabric, and hung the work purposefully to move with any light breeze.
Touch (2006,) a portfolio of six etchings created with Harlan and Weaver, addresses Smith’s collective themes of death, decay and mortality, as well as nostalgia and beauty.
Two (2002) is an intimate portrait of rest and awakening. Beautifully delicate etchings lines contours the body, rendering it familiar.
Throughout her prolific career, Smith has employed and challenged virtually every printmaking technique in existence, even inventing some along her way. She embraces printmaking not as a separate way of making work, but, as she does with sculpture and drawing, simply as a way communicating her vision and utilizing the medium for its purpose.
“It’s about repetition versus uniqueness. My interest in printmaking is that prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet everyone is different.”