Indulging in the oxymoronic appeal of MoMA PS1’s latest Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition

Feminist; performer; collaborator; monumental. These are some of the words that have been used to describe the American and French artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s work, which is now on display in her first major US exhibition. With over 200 works emphasising her multidisciplinary approach and engagement with social issues, Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life is housed at the MoMA PS1 and was curated by Ruba Katrib and assisted by Josephine Graf.

Alive from 1930 to 2002, the artist is known for her use of bright colours and abstract sculptures. The show features models, drawings, and substantial archival material including photographs, film, and video of her working. “She always told the story of the work, not just as a finished product, but as a process of making something with collaborators”, explains Katrib. Saint Phalle talked about her process and documented her projects, including everyone who contributed.

“A huge part of this [exhibit] was figuring out how to do justice to these projects and convey them while trying to understand that the final experience of them is elsewhere”, Katrib says. “Creating this world within the MoMA PS1 where people could feel like they were experiencing her work as if they were at the Tarot garden or at other sculptures was a challenge”. The energy of the space and the images of the space are not necessarily meant to make you feel like you’ve experienced her complete works. Instead, it’s meant to show that it’s still worth experiencing in person.

I first saw Niki de Saint Phalle’s work at the Pompidou in Paris when I was in college and I wrote a paper about her work. When it came to curating the show, what informed your vision for it?

What’s really interesting about Niki de Saint Phalle’s work is that she made work for the public sphere. She had an enormous reach and really touched a lot of people. For many, this [exhibit] is their first time seeing her public artwork. But also her work in the public sphere in many ways detracted from her reception within the art world. So I thought that this contradiction was really interesting that someone who transcended the art world as an artist was then also criticised by the art world.

She grew up in a very conservative society and a conservative family, and made it her mission to break free from that and came up from these avant-garde movements of the mid-century and was the only female member of the Nouveau réalisme, and collaborated with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. She was one of the few female artists, that was really working with these male artists. She really was a trailblazer, but she was also very misunderstood throughout her lifetime.

It was an interesting challenge to look at her work closely and give more depth to what she created, much of which has not been seen in the United States or understood. In my research on her, I realised she made all of these amazing parks and playgrounds and that part of her practice was understood. So it was my intention to bring this to light and really reintroduce her to the US.

What do you think was misunderstood about her?

That she was making superficial art and that she was a woman who was making simple art and wasn’t serious. But when you look at this show, I’m highlighting her major public projects and some that are private homes. She was actually really an architect. She was an interdisciplinary artist who did all of this radical stuff. She explored new media at a time when a lot of artists weren’t. She was actually ahead of her time and a central part of the exhibition is her Tarot garden which isn’t just a sculpture park. It’s these structures, some of which have interior spaces, one of which she actually lived in, with a kitchen and bathroom. This is a park she made over a 20-year span in northern Italy and Tuscany.

She laboured on this with a team of collaborators over a long period of time. It’s completely custom-built and every piece of tile, mosaic and mirror was made on-site and cut to fit these structures. So it was an enormous task and a huge accomplishment that was hugely experimental, risk-taking and trailblazing, but she did not get recognition for those projects.

What kind of subjects did she touch on? What informed her work particularly in relation to the colour palettes and the themes that she explored?

Through her shooting paintings, she launched onto the international stage. A young woman shooting a canvas with a rifle really captured the popular imagination, but she switched from making the shooting paintings into these big colourful, joyous and robust female figures. They were really a counter to patriarchal structures and representations of women. 

She really went against the grain and was always being provocative in her work by making something that was so unabashedly femme, feminine and aggressive. She was doing her own thing and was fiercely independent, but she also used bright colours and imagery that is appealing, but also unappealing. She liked to play with the line between attraction and repulsion. 

Her subjects included love and joy later on, but it was also coming from a place of trauma and pain. She didn’t try to cover up the dark things of life, but actually faced them and made them into something approachable. A lot of her sculptures are shaped like dragons and monsters and brightly coloured. She had this idea that kids should play with their monsters and face them. So her work was a constant act of confrontation of her own story, but also in a way that was relatable and more universal as well.

What, what do you think makes this exhibition distinct from other past ones of her work?

It’s her first major US exhibition and first New York museum show, even though she grew up in New York, it’s a very specific survey in many ways. There’s a little bit of an overview of her career but it really focuses on thoughts around architecture and the built environment and her works for the public space, which is represented through actual structure through models for her projects.

Her work took on the AIDS crisis. Her response to the crisis really early on was to make a book and an animation for adolescents. She tried to gear her response towards young people. Even her perfume.

Can you tell me more about the fragrance?

In 1982, she launched a perfume line with two intertwining snakes on the bottle. The snakes are symbols that she uses a lot in her work. She was actually afraid of snakes. She incorporated them to confront and deal with the things that scared her. It’s blue, and she thought of it as a sculpture and made different kinds of bottles. She made packaging that has scarves in it or pieces of jewellery. She thought of each one as an experience. 

There were different price points because she wanted to make it as accessible as possible. The sales of the perfume ended up funding one-third of the construction of the Tarot garden, which is the park in Italy that she was totally independently working on. She didn’t want to depend on the art market necessarily. So she really broadened her reach by welcoming children and women into her audience.

What do you think are some of the major themes in all of her work? What drove her to create?

For her art was a therapeutic and healing tool. It was really about dealing with the inevitability of pain and suffering in life and doing something that was potentially joyous or healing without brushing anything under the rug. She was always very open and confrontational about what she was addressing.

You really see it with the bright colours and forms she generates, which possess a sensation that definitely feels effective right now. It’s been interesting to see how the show resonates now after what’s been going on. For many visitors who are coming to museums for the first time and seeing these works, it’s been really nice to see some of their responses and overall uplifting effect.

Talk to me about her use of bright colours?

She loved bright colour, it was really confrontational and aggressive when you think about it.

Her work was something you couldn’t really be ambivalent about or ignore. She was very forceful in what she was saying by using bright colours, especially in the sixties. People didn’t use neon colours. She really started out with these really bright colours that were the antithesis to everything that was going on and how people dress and what kind of art people made. She knew she was doing something contrary to the trends and using really bright colours was part of that.

I have a background in the intersection of art and fashion and I noticed in the description, it refers to how she expanded her practice to include clothing and jewellery. Can you tell me a little about that?

She made perfume, jewellery, some high-end pieces and then she made some cheaper, pseudo-metallic pieces so they were more accessible. Then with clothing, she made scarves and things like that. There was this idea of wearable art. The jewellery is like a sculpture that you could wear. And the scarves showed her prints, using her symbolic symbology and her iconography.

Were there any artists in particular that informed or inspired her work?

She was really inspired by Gaudi and generally found projects and artists more inspiring than fine art itself. She looked at other sources of inspiration that were more outsider artists or visionary artists, and traditional artisans or craftsmen.

What are some of the things that you hope people might take away from visiting the exhibit and her work, maybe for people that have never heard of her or have never seen her work in person?

I think and hope people will realise how visionary and experimental she was and that she really laid the groundwork for practices. She was really a pioneer in these ways of thinking and working. I hope people gain a better understanding of her work and what she was doing and how it was all very connected.

Through its lead patronage, La Prairie chose to honour Saint Phalle’s audacious and visionary feminist spirit – her defiance of social norms and her willingness to break the codes both in her personal life and work.

This collaboration was taken by the Swiss luxury house as an opportunity to enable the world to experience Saint Phalle’s revolutionary work and also to shine a light on her achievements as a woman and an avant-garde artist who devoted her life to a vision of social, racial and gender equity.