New York City.- The Norah Haime Gallery is pleased to present “Niki de Saint Phalle: Her Art, Her Truth, Her Fantasy”, on view at the gallery from September 7th through October 29th. This retrospective exhibition will include works from 1960 up to the artist’s death in 2002. Saint Phalle’s art is a reflection of her dark, yet extravagant personal history. After having a nervous breakdown and receiving electric shocks in a psychiatric hospital in 1953, she began painting as a form of self-therapy to express her fear and rage. But as in fairy-tale ending, Saint Phalle countered her demons and embraced magic and color of life through art – the path she followed to do so is palpable in the exhibition.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris, to Jeanne Jacqueline (née Harper) and André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle, a banker. After being wiped out financially during the Great Depression, the family moved from France to the United States in 1933. Niki enrolled at the prestigious Brearley School in New York City, but she was dismissed for painting fig leaves red on the school’s statuary. She went on to attend Oldfields School in Glencoe, Maryland where she graduated in 1947. During her teenaged years, she was a fashion model; at the age of sixteen, she appeared on the cover of Life magazine (September 26, 1949), and, three years later, on the November 1952 cover of French Vogue. At eighteen, de Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews, whom she had known since the age of twelve, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While her husband studied music at Harvard University, de Saint Phalle began to paint, experimenting with different media and styles. Their first child, Laura, was born in April 1951. De Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular rules of conduct. However, after marrying young and giving birth to two children, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to reject; the internal conflict caused her to suffer a nervous breakdown.
As a form of therapy, she was urged to pursue her painting. While in Paris on a modeling assignment, de Saint Phalle was introduced to the American painter, Hugh Weiss, who became both her friend and mentor. He encouraged her to continue painting in her self-taught style. She subsequently moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, where her son Philip was born in May 1955. While in Spain, de Saint Phalle read the works of Proust and visited Madrid and Barcelona, where she became deeply affected by the work of Antonio Gaudí. Gaudí’s influence opened many previously unimagined possibilities for de Saint Phalle, especially with regard to the use of unusual materials and objets-trouvés as structural elements in sculpture and architecture. De Saint Phalle was particularly struck by Gaudí’s “Park Güell” which persuaded her to create one day her own garden-based artwork that would combine both artistic and natural elements. Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after she and her family moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her first art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland, where she displayed her naïve style of oil painting. She then took up collage work that often featured images of the instruments of violence, such as guns and knives. In the late 1950’s, de Saint Phalle was ill with hyperthyroidism which was eventually treated by an operation in 1958.
Sometime during the early 1960’s, she left her first husband. After the “Shooting paintings” came a period when she explored the various roles of women. She made life size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth. They were usually dressed in white. They were primarily made of polyester with a wire framework. They were generally created from papier mâché. Inspired by the pregnancy of her friend Clarice Rivers, the wife of American artist Larry Rivers, she began to use her artwork to consider archetypal female figures in relation to her thinking on the position of women in society. Her artistic expression of the proverbial everywoman were named ‘Nanas’. The first of these freely posed forms—made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth—were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September 1965. For this show, Iolas published her first artist book that includes her handwritten words in combination with her drawings of ‘Bananas’. Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly productive output of graphic work that accompanied exhibitions that included posters, books, and writings. In 1966, she collaborated with fellow artist Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a large-scale sculpture installation, “hon-en katedral” (“she-a cathedral”) for Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. The outer form of “hon” is a giant, reclining ‘Nana’, whose internal environment is entered from between her legs. The piece elicited immense public reaction in magazines and newspapers throughout the world. The interactive quality of the “hon” combined with a continued fascination with fantastic types of architecture intensifies her resolve to see her own architectural dreams realized. During the construction of the “hon-en katedral,” she met Swiss artist Rico Weber, who became an important assistant and collaborator for both de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. During the 1960s, she also designed decors and costumes for two theatrical productions: a ballet by Roland Petit, and an adaptation of the Aristophanes play “Lysistrata.” In 1971, de Saint Phalle and Tinguely married. Saint Phalle died in 2002, at the age of 71 in La Jolla, California.
The Nohra Haime Gallery was founded in 1981. Its principal focus is on the representation of an international group of contemporary artists whose diverse practices include painting, drawing, sculpture, video and photography. The program includes historical artists as well as established artists and new voices. The gallery is also known for organizing historically significant group exhibitions. Since its founding, the gallery has also specilized in the resale of select works of art from the 20th century including Latin American Art. The Nohra Haime gallery is located at 730 Fifth Avenue, New York. The gallery is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America. Visit the galery’s website at … http://www.nohrahaimegallery.com