Niki de Saint Phalle

From February 3 to May 21, 2023, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting Niki de Saint Phalle’s (1930–2002) radical and visionary work in a comprehensive survey exhibition. Through around one hundred works, the extensive show illuminates the breadth of Saint Phalle’s artistic spectrum, from her early paintings to her large-scale sculptures.

Saint Phalle is one of the most famous women artists of her generation and is deemed a main representative of European Pop Art and a cocreator of the Happening. In the five decades of her creative work, she developed an unmistakable language of form and a multifaceted oeuvre. The Nanas, her colorful large-format sculptures of women, laid the foundations for her international success and are regarded to this day as her trademark.

However, Saint Phalle was an autodidact whose artistic spectrum also extended far beyond these pieces. She focused on different techniques, topics, and working methods and created ambivalent and subversive works full of joy and brutality, humor and waywardness. For her, art was more than a mere means of expression: it was a personal necessity that could be used to challenge social conventions.

Dr. Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, explains: “With our exhibition Niki de Saint Phalle, we are showing at the Schirn how the creator of the globally popular Nanas was a visionary and politically minded artist. She consistently saw her work as directly situated within life and connected to social discourses. Through her collectively produced works, in which she also allowed viewers to take part, and her monumental sculptures in public spaces, she created new forms of participation. She initiated a public dialogue through her art on socially relevant issues that are still pressing today. With this in mind, I am pleased to be able to present the radical as well as humorous work of the artist, in all facets of her five-decade oeuvre, to a broad audience in Frankfurt.”

In her work, Saint Phalle repeatedly articulated a plea for women and the feminine. She criticized institutions and conventional models and addressed social and political issues in her work, including war and violence as well as the stigmatization associated with AIDS, the right to abortion, gun laws, and climate change.

Early in her career, Saint Phalle departed from painting and managed to establish herself in the male-dominated art scene. Her early paintings were followed by assemblages, and by the 1960s she was creating her legendary Shooting Pictures or Tirs in spectacular performances, in which she involved the audience. Her drawings, writings, and large-scale sculptures, as well as plays, films, and installations in public space, bear witness to the transformative power of her art, which reached its climax in her architectural life’s work, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany.

Katharina Dohm, curator of the exhibition, remarks: “Niki de Saint Phalle continues to fascinate us today with her enormous creative power and the broad spectrum of her artistic expression. She uncompromisingly defied the rigid social conventions of her time and the prevailing rules of the art world. Her artistic urge to create was fed by her rage against a society permeated by patriarchal structures, which she challenged with her openhearted, provocative work. Both joyful and macabre depictions and a keen sense of the ambiguity of good and evil permeate her entire oeuvre.”

The exhibition Niki de Saint Phalle is supported by the Dr. Marschner Stiftung.

An exhibition in cooperation with Kunsthaus Zürich.

A catalog has been published by Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft / Kunsthaus Zürich and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, in German and English editions. With a foreword by the director of the Schirn, Dr. Sebastian Baden, and contributions by Rhiannon Ash, Christoph Becker, Monster Chetwynd, Bice Curiger, Katharina Dohm, Sandra Gianfreda, Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold, Cathérine Hug, Seppi Imhof, Mickry 3, Shana Moulton, Nicolas Party, and Laure Prouvost.

A free digital tutorial guide, the Digitorial®, is available online here.

Director: Dr. Sebastian Baden
Curators: Katharina Dohm, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and Christoph Becker, Kunsthaus Zürich
Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/PR): 
presse [​at​] schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148 
Press material: schirn.de/en/newsroom