Blood Pool and a Floor of Stars, Kiki Smith Returns to Los Angeles After Thirty Years
Jeffrey Deitch and Pace team up for the sculptor’s first solo show in the city in thirty years, opening October 30.
Kiki Smith will open Untethered Journey at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery at 925 North Orange Drive on Friday, October 30, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Presented jointly by Deitch and Pace Gallery, it is the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles in thirty years, and it stays on view through January 23, 2027.
The exhibition gathers Smith’s sculptures of the body, among them the early bronzes Virgin Mary (1994) and Blood Pool (1992), alongside work in papier mâché, beeswax, polyester resin and fiberglass. In Moon on Crutches, a 2002 series cast in aluminum and bronze, a single body hangs suspended in a tangle of lines. The seminal 1989 Untitled, known as the “red room,” fills the air with ghostly paper figures hung from the ceiling between large sheets drawn in blood red, according to Pace.
Recent bronze owls and goats share the exhibition with large paper works that take in the sweep of the cosmos. Stars and Scat (1996), a wide blue expanse of Nepalese paper dotted with Schott crystal stars and bronze pellets, is installed directly on the floor. “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” Smith has said, a line the gallery quotes in its announcement.
The show grows out of old friendships. Deitch met Smith in 1975, later supported A. More Store, the artist-run shop she led from 1981, and included her sculpture Mother/Child (1993), which is on view here, in Aperto ‘93 at the 45th Venice Biennale. Pace founder Arne Glimcher first met her as a young woman helping her father, Tony Smith, build models for his works. Pace has represented her since 1994, and this is her sixteenth solo exhibition with the gallery.
“This is the first time that we are presenting an entire exhibition together, and the first time a collaboration of this sort is taking place in another gallery. Working with Jeffrey on this project has been pure joy,” Glimcher said.
Born in Nuremberg in 1954, Smith lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley. The same evening, from 6 to 8 p.m., Deitch also opens Barry McGee’s Another Round at its gallery on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and North Orange Drive.
