1990
painted polyester, gold leafs
272 x 74 x 67 cm
Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American artist who came to prominence in the 1960’s with her monumental and voluptuous “Nana” sculptures, celebrating female liberation, fertility and sexual freedom. These bold and colourful works were a rare intervention by a woman artist in public space in the twentieth century, asserting a feminist vision of a woman with the power and confidence to take up space and be seen, and by doing so they served a talismanic function for an artist deeply engaged with Hermetic symbolism and the Divine Feminine.
In the 1970’s, and inspired by her esoteric studies and the famous Marseille Tarot, she set out to create a magnificent and unique sculpture park, Il Giardino dei Tarocchi (The Tarot Garden) in Tuscany. The garden expands on the themes of personal transformation, ritual and spiritual journeys of transmutation, and The Prophet (1990) picks up on Saint Phalle’s fascination with the Major Arcana by evoking a figure with qualities reflecting the major Tarot archetypes of the Spiritual Teacher, The Truth Seeker and the Magician, a Shamanic fount of sacred knowledge and manifester of divine visions.
Using her characteristic combination of fibreglass and polyester resin permitted Saint Phalle to create lightweight but durable sculptures suitable for installation outside, with stable and highly pigmented surfaces embedded with glass, mosaic and other found objects.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was a sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely recognized as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and her artistic work. Many of Saint Phalle’s large-scale sculptures are exhibited in public places, including Paris (near Centre Pompidou, San Diego, Niece, and Stockholm. Her art is included in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice.
