Collection: Niki de Saint Phalle

(Neuilly-sur-Seine 1930 - San Diego 2002)

Niki de Saint Phalle was one of the most original and unmistakable voices of the second half of the twentieth century. Before becoming a sculptor, painter, and director, she was a woman who used art to survive herself: her early works, the famous Tirs, were canvases or plaster panels in which she had hidden bags of color, then shot at in front of an audience. Upon impact, the color exploded on the white surface in unpredictable splashes: each shot was both destruction and creation. A violent and liberating gesture, which transformed the act of painting into performance, earning her the attention of the Nouveau Réalisme group and placing her at the center of the European art scene in the early 1960s.
Then came the Nanas: goddesses, warriors, creatures balancing between archetype and irony, colorful bodies dancing covered in hearts, snakes, and mandalas. In a male-dominated art world, de Saint Phalle built an iconographic universe where femininity is not an ornament, but a force that takes up space.
The culmination of this vision is the Tarot Garden, created in Capalbio, Tuscany, starting in 1979 and inaugurated in 1998: a park of monumental sculptures inspired by the arcana of the tarot, where architecture, sculpture, and color merge into a total environment. A work that de Saint Phalle considered the work of her life.
She received the Praemium Imperiale in 2000, the most prestigious international recognition for visual arts.
Her silkscreens bring to paper the same unmistakable energy as her large sculptures: figures that explode with color, forms that always seem on the verge of moving.