(born in Nuremberg in 1954)
Rainbow, 1999, 18 glass tears, signed and dated on the bottom of one tear Kiki Smith 1999, dimensions variable, largest: height 22 cm, smallest: height 16 cm

Provenance:
Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent
acquired from the above by the present owner ca. 2005 – Private Collection, Belgium

Exhibited:
Ghent, Galerie Fortlaan 17, 21 March - 22 June 2002 London, Heart of Glass, the Craft Council, 21 November 2002 – 26 January 2003
Sunderland, The National Glass Center, 10 February - 21 April 2003

Kiki Smith is one of the most important voices of contemporary Feminist art and one of the first artists to rediscover figurative work after years of Abstraction and Minimalism dominating the scene. She is considered a pioneer in restoring the figure as an acceptable subject in contemporary art. Smith has presented numerous solo exhibitions worldwide including more than 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including in 2017, and back in the late 1970s participated in exhibitions with major players in the art scene, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

New York Times art critic Holland Cotter summed up Smith’s style perfectly: “This is not a fashionable style; for much of the art world it never has been. And maybe that’s why, more and more, her art seems to occupy a universe of its own, a floating world where art, like religion, is both high and low, gross and fine, and always about the only essential things”.

Decay, rebirth, and the eternal cycles of life recur throughout her work, often linking the body with the natural world and spiritual realm. These “teardrops”, conceived to be on the ground, are part of a research on glass she started in the mid-1980s to extend her inquiries into the body, using the transparency of the material for depictions of internal anatomy and to convey a highly poetic message of fragility and ephemerality