Kiki Smith - Virgin Mary Poster (Blue)

Kiki Smith
Virgin Mary Poster
1992
Screenprint and rubber stamp on handmade Nepalese paper
19.5 x 30 in
Edition of 3000

Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. Born in 1954 to American parents living in Nuremberg, Germany, her father was minimalist sculptor Tony Smith.

Smith credits her Catholic upbringing as sparking her interest in the human body as a religious artifact. In a profile on the artist in the New York Times, Smith said, “Catholicism is a body-fetishized religion. It’s always taking inanimate things and giving meaning to them. Also my father was ill for the last 20 years of his life. So I thought about the body a lot.”

She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles.

Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.