Tate Liverpool
Friday 1st February – Monday 5th May
Niki de Saint Phalle is one of those artists who is undeservedly unknown in the UK. In the early 1960s she became the only female member of the avant-garde Nouveau Réalistes and she is generally only remembered for her collaborations with other (male) artists.
It is hardly too surprising that for a while she experimented with shooting paint-crammed male effigies. Extreme as this may sound, it was more than simple man bashing which, I hasten to add, she fervently disagreed with. In what became known as her ‘shooting paintings’ she had a tremendous impact on her contemporaries and was the first person to do anything like it.
Now every Tom, Dick and his equally plagiaristic friend uses a gun to ‘shock’ the public. But there is far more to her than this. Her work is simultaneously violent, provocative, harrowing and beautiful, which is no easy task to fulfil. She largely explores themes of the woman as a goddess regardless of shape, colour or whatever, on top of a bit of Freudian weirdness. I found impossible to drag myself away from one of her films, called ‘Daddy’, despite the fact that I found most of it decidedly disturbing. To me, the fact that my mind was reeling as I was sitting on the train home makes her an incredible artist.
As I wandered around the exhibition, what got to me the most was the clear sense of her love for everything around her. According de Saint Phalle herself, she felt that she needed to create art to exorcise her demons, but in her later work (after the initial period of shootings and razor blade collages, obviously) it’s hard to suppose that she had any loathing left in her. In fact, it’s tough to believe that the first room, full of rather terrifying assemblages, and the second room, bursting with soft earth-mother sculptures in vibrant pinks and blues, contain work by the same artist.
I think this is what makes de Saint Phalle so fascinating: you can never quite make up your mind whether or not you should feel comforted by her work. She has an ability to express deeply personal emotions that many people struggle to ascertain they even have, but deals with such complex feelings in an almost childlike way (monsters appear frequently). This is what makes her work so beautiful.
8/10
Comment
Have your say, tell us what you think...