Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is one of the most influential artists of today. She is known for her use of the human form in her work as a means to provide an unsettling critique on contemporary issues we face today as a species and as a society. She states “I think I chose the body as a subject, not consciously, but because it is the one form that we all share: it’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with.” (Kiki Smith, Bullfinch Press, 1998)

Her works are in many prominent museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Over the past decade she has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times. In 2000 Kiki Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for sculpture, and in 2006 she was the winner of the Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (SMFA).

Kiki Smith’s book The Vitreous Body is a meditation on light and vision, its text resonates in the words of classic Greek Parmenides and is illuminated by the artist’s woodcuts. The book is printed on translucent paper, giving the manuscript a physical lightness in keeping with the ancient use of vellum.

The woodcuts were created in collaboration with the Graphicstudio invented technique of heliorelief, which allows photographic images to be transferred to a block of wood. The image is then put into relief not by traditional handcutting, but by sandblasting. The text was printed from polymer plastic plates. Both images and text were printed on Japanese paper using a letterset press

Images courtesy of Graphicstudio/USF