Niki de Saint Phalle: Exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich – Culture

Guardian angels are invisible. But in Zurich it’s different. For a good 25 years, the eleven meter long and 1.2 tonne sculpture “Ange protecteur” with golden wings has been floating in the main hall of the main train station at a height of 15 meters above the heads of travelers. The trendy colors and the rounded formal language of the French-American painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), who loved to paint her “Nanas” – colloquial French for “woman” or “girl” – in the eighties and nineties placed in public space is familiar to the public. Paradoxically, however, the artist seemed to have been forgotten. The big Saint Phalle exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich is just in time. Because with around 100 exhibits – drawings, paintings, models, videos and sculptures – it becomes visible again what a fascinatingly diverse and unique work the exceptional artist and century figure of the present has left behind.

Christoph Becker, the outgoing Zurich Kunsthaus director, wants the show to paint a differentiated picture of the artist and her work. Saint Phalle is a “popular outsider whose formal language has made an impression on us,” explains the curator. Many of her works are “very well known and popular, but the cliché of the funny, colorful Nanas doesn’t get to the heart of her work”. For Becker, Saint Phalle’s art is not only “humorous and cheerful”, but also “gloomy”, “brutal and disturbing”. And perhaps even this two-sided reading does not go far enough. After all, throughout her life the artist endeavored to go beyond the limits of the museum in order to reach the widest possible public.

Saint Phalle’s meteoric rise to world fame meant her work was long shunned by art historians

What keeps Saint Phalle’s work so alive to this day and what makes it appealing to younger artists and curators is undoubtedly its political and feminist orientation. Saint Phalle himself once described it this way: “I always thought you had to provoke, attack religion and attack the generals. Until I realized: Nothing is as shocking as joy.” How contagious and contemporary this feminist joy has remained can be seen, among other things, from the fact that Cecilia Alemani, the artistic director of this year’s Venice Biennale, made a sculpture of Nana, two and a half meters high and two meters wide, entitled “Gwendolyn” very prominent in her had the Biennale set up. And last year, the New York Museum of Modern Art in PS1 showed the most extensive Saint Phalle exhibition to date in the USA under the title “Structures for Life” with around 200 exhibits. The work of Saint Phalle is now being rediscovered across the board.

Whereby this rediscovery partly bears the traits of a rehabilitation. Oddly enough, Saint Phalle’s meteoric rise to world fame during his lifetime led to her work being avoided in art historical discourse for a long time. Perhaps similar to younger colleague Keith Haring, who worked with a Swiss watchmaker, Saint Phalle raised suspicions with affordable inflatable nanas and a line of perfumes, among other things. Strange but true: In the art world, which is organized in the form of a market, certain forms of “commerce” are frowned upon. But it was precisely this kind of income that gave the artist the necessary freedom for major projects, such as the sculpture and architecture park “Giardino dei Tarocchi” in Tuscany, on which she worked for over 20 years and which is now an international place of pilgrimage. In this respect, such economies are not irrelevant, and it is surprising that this part of her artistic practice still remains underexposed.

Open detailed view

In Zurich, the tour begins with early paintings and assemblages from the 1950s, which give little hint of the furore that the artist would unleash on the international scene. At the beginning of the 1960s, Saint Phalle became a sensation in Paris with her “shooting pictures”. In performative shooting actions, she fired her gun at her own pictures in front of an audience. She had previously prepared the canvases with all sorts of found objects and bags, which she filled with paint, eggs or spaghetti and covered with plaster. When these assemblages were hit, their content flowed across the canvas and colored it. Saint Phalle wanted to “bleed” her paintings in this way. And, of course, she also indirectly targeted the supremacy of men, who claimed that women could not produce great art.

She achieved a world career at a time when women were still largely denied access to the top positions in the art world

A rather inconspicuous “shooting picture” from the early 1960s shows just how much humor there is in this group of works: a bulging, largely intact plaster surface is set in a wide ornate frame. “Old Master (non tiré)”, i.e.: “Old Master (not shot)” is the title. Obviously, the artist refrained from a coup de grace in this case. The “shooting suit” itself, which the artist wore for her actions, is also on display. In the tailored overalls, which the artist had sewn from a lined, strong white fabric, she must have looked like a racing driver or fighter pilot. Splashes of paint bear witness to its history.

Open detailed view

Saint Phalle, who was self-taught, literally had to shoot her way to the top in the ’60s. She achieved a world career at a time when women were still largely denied access to the top positions in the art world. But she was also one of a handful of female artists whose art at the beginning of the 1960s opposed the slick, media-derived images of women in Pop Art, and whose works are now attracting great interest again. Saint Phalle, on the other hand, found an artistic cooperation and life partner in the slightly older Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely, with whom she realized numerous projects.

Open detailed view

One of her most spectacular performances is an installation that is now considered a milestone in feminist art practice: in 1966, with the support of Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt, Saint Phalle created a huge, walk-in sculpture of a colorfully painted pregnant woman in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm Vulva portal could be entered. “Hon” – “She” lay on her back on the floor, knees raised, heels up. The artist had installed a milk bar inside the giantess and had an early Greta Garbo film shown. The installation, which was temple, playground and place of refuge, was so space-filling that it had to be destroyed after the end of the exhibition. “Hon,” this “Ur-Nana,” writes Swiss art historian and curator Cathérine Hug in her catalog essay, “is still one of the most radical things art history has ever done in terms of female nudity.” Radical to this day also because “in a phallocentric world order […] an open vagina, if intended for anything other than sexual intercourse or childbirth, must represent an “excessive provocation”. The exhibition includes a small “model for Hon”, drawings, photographs and a video of the installation work.

Open detailed view

Saint Phalle, who was sexually abused by her father as a child and made it public in an artist book in the 1990s, also took her art seriously as a medium for social issues. It could be a 1990 educational film about AIDS produced on behalf of the French authorities, with music by David Byrne. After leaving the exhibition, one also appreciates the guardian angel in the Zurich train station better. Because with its volume it claims a place that had to be fought for hard.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Kunsthaus Zurich. Until 01/08/2023.