Statement:

I like fabric from India and Nepal, with all that pattern and repetition, and I'm crazy about statues of Madonnas that have amazing carving, and I like all that gushy baroque stuff. Basically, I would just like to be putting roses all over everything.

Biography:

Kiki Smith (American, born Germany, 1954) is among the most significant artists of her generation. Known primarily as a sculptor, she has also devoted herself to printmaking, which she considers an equally vital part of her work. Thematically, her focus is on such topics as anatomy, self-portraiture, nature, and female iconography. Smith is known for looking at the human form from the inside out. One example is her sculpture consisting of a pair of life-size wax nudes: a man and a woman, dangling side by side as if crucified. The figures, with their yellowed skin, blank faces, and drooping limbs, are made to appear as gruesome as two corpses from a morgue. While they resemble real people, they also evoke biblical images of wounded saints and martyrs. Smith's work presents the human body as a battered, exhausted subject in the sea of modernity. Her work encompasses everything from unconventional, silk-screened t-shirts to chandeliers made of aluminum foil, in addition to more traditional drawings and sculptures. Some of her art strays completely from her well-known, viscerally disruptive sculptures: she's done an entire series of Minimalist prints and has worked with floral fabrics as well. Photo by Herb Ritts for Gap, Inc.