The Blogazine

Little Red Riding Hood Is The Wolf

Kiki Smith (German-born in 1954, but a long-time New Yorker) has been investigating the relation between space and human bodies, psychology shaped by instincts and fantasies since 90’s.

The works by Smith – mainly sculptures and drawings on paper with a sharp and direct mark – reflect her introspective and intimate concept of art, somehow seen as a post-traumatic experience and lived as a sort of exorcism. Showing female images – sometimes stained with blood, laid down on the floor, in a mystic ecstasy, or crawling and losing their entrails – the artist recalls mother and childish figures immersed in dreamlike atmospheres like fairytale characters, but not necessarily “positive”.

With evocative poetry, which gathers together ancestral and esoteric symbols: mythological creatures, owls and fawns that bring to mind the eternal interchange between brightness and darkness as in Persephone’s rise and descent from and to Hades, Kiki Smith shows the perishability of human bodies and their vulnerability. Using wax, chalk, china, bronze and dropping them on organs such as hearts, wombs, pelvises, and ribs, the artist seems to play an archaic and, at the same time, erotic and twisted ritual, expressing a strong and primary aptitude, which tends toward death. Fighting against patriarchy is a key factor that always rules her works, but while for Louise Bourgeois (25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) this approach was focused on men’s destruction, Smith moves her attention to women’s diverse forms of mourning.

In By the Stream at Raffaella Cortese Gallery, the artist makes use of photography as a mean to retrace her hold dear subjects and imaginative worlds; once again living beings have been thrown into the nature of fabulous and timeless scenarios. Shooting details of her creations, Smith opens the door to numerous interpretations: a red cap hides one’s face, is this the image of a woman who fights the wolf, succumbs to it, or learns to live in symbiosis with it and, more in general, with the mother earth? She could be fragile, scared and abused, but also well aware of her nature, able to move between objective and unconscious reality, embodying the maiden, the mother and/or the Mistress of animals as an evolved archetype: a sort of contemporary Hecate.

Kiki Smith’s exhibition will run until 15th November 2012 along with the solo show by the Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlovà, hosted in the second space of the gallery.