1930 Neuilly-sur-Seine
2002 San Diego/Kalifornien

Born at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930, the painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle grew up in New York. At the age of eighteen she married the American writer Harry Matthews. After their divorce she lived with the painter Jean Tinguely from 1960, who introduced her to the Paris artist group 'Nouveau Réalistes'. She launched her 'rifle-shot' paintings at their group shows: Niki de Saint Phalle used a gun to shoot paint balls at a canvas primed to a pastose texture with a palette knife. Bursting and spattering on contact, the paint balls coloured the relief. The aggressive act of shooting helped the artist to work through and come to terms with a troubled relationship with her father. However, her Nanas, the first of which emerged in 1964, would bring her far more fame. The artist intended the buxom, colourful female figures made at first of wool, yarn, paper-maché and wire scaffoldings and later of painted polyester, to be understood as happy, independent women and harbingers of a new matriacharic age. Nanas stand e.g. on the banks of the Leine at Hanover, where the artist had one of her first spectacular one-woman shows in 1969. Her biggest project was the Tarot Garden she began to work on in Tuscany in 1979, which entailed populating an entire landscape with walk-in Nanas. In 1988 she collaborated with Tinguely to design the world-famous 'Stravinsky Fountain' beside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. From the 1950s Niki de Saint Phalle showed work at numerous exhibitions across the world and is acclaimed as the artist who introduced the determinant theme of the female life principle to art history. In 1994 she moved to California on the advice of her doctor to benefit from the mild climate. There she worked on her last large series, a playful tribute to Tinguely's movable sculptures, 'Exploding Pictures'. On 22 May 2002 Niki de Saint Phalle died of emphysema, which she had contracted from years of inhaling toxic polyester fumes while working on her art projects. Posthumously the artist is still going from strength to strength. In 2003 her former colleagues completed and inaugurated her Baroque grotto in the Herrenhäuser Gardens in Hanover, a brilliantly colourful, glittering work composed of glass mosaics, stones and figures.

Saint Phalle

Saint Phalle

Saint Phalle

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