A golden-winged, five-meter-tall Angel of Temperance by Niki de Saint Phalle hangs above the grand glass entranceway of Quebec Metropolis’s Musée nationwide des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ). It is sensible: the French American artist is finest recognized in North America for these voluptuous female sculptures—her Nanas. However past the foyer, guests to “Niki de Saint Phalle The Eighties and Nineties: Artwork Unleashed” will uncover that these well-known girls could also be bigger than life however are only a small a part of her legacy.
The exhibition focuses on the ultimate twenty years of the late artist’s profession, when she was obsessive about making a monumental sculpture backyard in Italy primarily based on the tarot deck and embraced artistic (and business) methods to make that dream a actuality.
The present, produced in collaboration with Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse, has greater than 150 objects on show, from fantastical monumental sculptures coated in glittering mosaics to small family objects equivalent to vases and fragrance bottles—every bearing Niki de Saint Phalle’s distinctive shiny colours and sensuous curves.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She spent her youth in New York, the place she labored as a mannequin, showing on the covers of Life and Vogue magazines. After returning to Europe in her twenties, the self-taught artist joined the nouveau réalisme artwork motion—the one lady within the group, which additionally included her future second husband and collaborator, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely. Her offended “taking pictures sequence” Tir (during which she fired a rifle at collages stuffed with paint) attracted the eye of admirers like Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí and John Cage. The joyful Nana sculptures quickly adopted: giant girls, all breasts and buttocks, in ecstatic acrobatic poses.
The MNBAQ exhibition begins in 1978: the 12 months de Saint Phalle began plotting her Tarot Backyard. Impressed by Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona, she envisioned a village-in-a-garden, stuffed with huge sculptures representing the Main Arcana of the tarot deck. She would dedicate herself to this work for twenty years, dwelling for a time inside one of many sculptures.
On show listed here are architectural drawings and an unique maquette for The Empress—a lady introduced as a Sphinx, with exaggerated conical breasts. Simply reverse the maquette in a glass case is a small however important object in Niki de Saint Phalle’s ‘80s oeuvre: a sq. fragrance bottle of cobalt blue glass, topped with two intertwined snakes.
Launched in 1982 with a celebration in New York sponsored by Andy Warhol’s Interview journal, the Niki de Saint Phalle fragrance was her means of elevating cash for the Tarot Backyard. She had licensed her artwork for merchandise as early as 1968 (inflatable Nanas, which you’ll nonetheless buy within the MNBAQ reward store). However the Tarot Backyard wanted massive cash, and after discovering that the golden age of artwork patronage had handed, the artist threw herself into entrepreneurial mode. It was an excellent “aspect” hustle. The fragrance ended up financing one-third of the challenge.
The Dwelling with Artwork room showcases her mass-produced furnishings from the ‘80s, examples of which embrace chairs, tables, lamps and mirrors. A number of vases, tiny variations of her Nanas, might be seen as a commentary on the convergence of sexuality and domesticity. What they actually represented was her monetary freedom, of turning into her personal self-contained business.
The exhibition takes a flip after that. In opposition to darkish blue partitions are drawings for her 1986 illustrated handbook, AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Arms. The artist was one of many earliest supporters of AIDS charities, and 70,000 copies of the e book had been distributed free in faculties.
Close by is The Wall of Rage, a numbered record of terrible issues that impressed her Sixties taking pictures work. It looks like a backward step, misplaced. So does a video set up of her 1973 quick movie Daddy, with its nod to the cruelties inflicted on her as a toddler by her father.
The ultimate part, “American Years,” turns to the Nineties, when Niki de Saint Phalle moved again to america. In California, she discovered inspiration in “Black Heroes” together with Michael Jordan, Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker. As soon as once more, we’re again within the land of shimmering mosaic sculptures and colourful figures in flight.
On the finish of the exhibition is Cranium II. A kinetic piece created with Tinguely—a painted polyester sculpture coated in refracting mirrors—presents a transferring punctuation. Niki de Saint Phalle died of respiratory failure in 2002 on the age of 72, doubtless resulting from long-term injury brought on by working with the resins that made her well-known. Due to her maverick entrepreneurial and advertising initiatives, she was capable of depart behind the finished Tarot Backyard and a legacy of daring, joyful insurrection.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s “The Eighties and Nineties: Artwork Unleashed” runs at Musée nationwide des beaux-arts du Québec by means of January 4, 2026.
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