Take a little stardust, a few glimmers of moonlight, bodies viewed from every angle and a woodland bestiary. Imagine drawings and prints on crumpled, pulped or collaged paper. Vast tapestries resembling mythological tales. Bronze sculptures, sometimes raw, sometimes patinated. Conjure these images and Kiki Smith’s world begins to take shape. Born in 1954, the artist has spent more than 40 years developing a practice that rejects any hierarchy between media. Printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, tapestry and installation: each technique becomes a playground for exploration and experimentation. This freedom runs throughout her work and shapes the journey devised by MO.CO., conceived as a true odyssey through her artistic universe.
The exhibition brings together more than 100 works created between 1983 and 2023, their forms and materials constantly shifting. Yet one element remains constant: the body. Not merely as an outer shell, but as a vast territory to explore. Kiki Smith’s fascination began early, when she discovered Gray’s Anatomy, Henry Gray’s celebrated anatomical treatise, which also left its mark on Jean-Michel Basquiat. Teeth, jaws, organs, anatomical fragments and entire figures punctuate her work, moving continually between the microscopic and the monumental.
The female body occupies a central place. Kiki Smith portrays it at every stage of life and in countless guises, invoking the witch, the domestic figure and the animal-woman. Hybridisation becomes a language in its own right, allowing her to explore metamorphosis, vulnerability and power.
This fascination with storytelling also runs through her monumental tapestries. Profoundly influenced by her discovery of the Apocalypse Tapestry at the Château d’Angers, Kiki Smith turns this medium into a space where myths, nature and human figures converge. Like the rest of her work, these tapestries create a world in which every element belongs to a vast network of correspondences.
Walking through the galleries, one sometimes feels as though entering a cabinet of curiosities. Scales shift, materials converse and forms echo one another. The human mingles with the animal, the natural world meets the cosmic, and the visible brushes against the invisible. This constant interplay creates a world in which boundaries cease to exist.
On leaving the exhibition, one impression lingers: that of having travelled through a shifting, sensory landscape. A space where the intimate, the cosmos, the living world and the imagination converge…
→ Being Here | Now | Everywhere, until 11 October 2026 at MO.CO., Montpellier.