Niki de Saint Phalle is best known for her Nanas (French slang for “girls”) – large, leaping female figures painted in kaleidoscopic hues and often found frolicking through fountains or city squares – and the Tarot Garden (1979–2002), a vast sculpture park she built in Tuscany, Italy, alive with fantastical mosaiced and mirrored creatures. Beginning her career with a series of Tirs (Shooting Paintings), wherein she would explode bags of paint on canvas by shooting them with a rifle, the artist quickly expanded into sculpture, installation, public art, architecture, parks and playgrounds, videos and films, and various editioned multiples which brought her art to the broadest public possible and funded her most ambitious outdoor projects. De Saint Phalle’s female forms are bulbous and broad, with breasts, bellies, and buttocks accentuated with painted hearts, flowers, suns, and mandala-like concentric circles. With Hon-en katedral (1966), a collaboration between de Saint Phalle, her partner Jean Tinguely, and others presented at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, visitors could literally enter the splayed figure through an opening between her legs. Towering over 2.5 metres tall, Gwendolyn (1966 / 1990) is one of de Saint Phalle’s first monumental Nanas. If Gwendolyn’s wide, sinuous curves do not adequately accentuate her pregnancy, then the bullseye painted on her stomach proudly announces it.
Melanie Kress
