Niki de Saint Phalle 

Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle  ( 1930-2002 )

Niki de Saint Phalle, whose real name was Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, was born on 29 October 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and died on 21 May 2002 in La Jolla, California. A multidisciplinary artist, she is known for her bold and colourful style, as well as her feminist and socially engaged works, which left their mark on 20th-century contemporary art.

Born into a Franco-American upper-class family, Niki de Saint Phalle spent her childhood between France and the United States. At the age of 3, she moved with her family to New York, where she was raised in a strict and conservative environment. She was deeply affected by her difficult childhood: she later revealed that she had been the victim of incestuous rape by her father, a trauma that she evoked in some of her works.

She began her career as a model in the 1950s, posing for magazines such as Vogue and Life. But she soon felt the need to express herself in other ways and turned to art, without any formal academic training. It was her mental health issues and a stay in a psychiatric clinic that sparked her true artistic calling. Art became a means of healing for her.

She began her artistic career in the late 1950s. Influenced by art brut, surrealism and expressionism, she began creating assemblages and collages. In 1961, she joined the New Realists movement, alongside artists such as Yves Klein, Arman and Jean Tinguely, who would later become her husband and artistic collaborator.

One of her first major series was ‘Tirs’ (Shootings). In these provocative works, she shot at paint-filled bags hidden inside plaster sculptures. These spectacular performances denounced violence and patriarchal society, and expressed a form of personal liberation. They caused scandal but attracted international attention.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Niki de Saint Phalle created her most famous works: the ‘Nanas’, large sculptures of women with generous, colourful forms. These exuberant figures, dancing or reclining, celebrate femininity, motherhood and the freedom of the female body. Inspired both by archetypes and by her vision of a powerful woman, the ‘Nanas’ break with the classic representations of the submissive or fragile woman.

These monumental sculptures are made from a variety of materials: papier mâché, polyester, resin, and sometimes concrete. One of the most iconic is ‘Hon’, a gigantic reclining ‘Nana’ created in 1966 for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm: visitors entered her body through her vagina, a daring provocation in the museum world of the time.

In the 1970s, Niki de Saint Phalle devoted more and more energy to monumental projects. Her most ambitious work is the Tarot Garden, a sculpture park located in Tuscany, Italy. Inspired by the major arcana of the tarot, this magical garden, which she financed largely herself, took her more than twenty years to complete. Today, it is considered one of the great masterpieces of environmental art.

She also collaborated with Jean Tinguely on several public projects, such as the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, located near the Pompidou Centre, and the Hanover Grotto.

In addition to her fight for women's rights, Niki de Saint Phalle was also committed to fighting racism, AIDS and violence. Her works are political statements, often marked by humour and irony, but always with a deep sincerity.

She died in 2002 from respiratory problems, caused in part by inhaling toxic substances used in her works. She left behind a powerful, joyful and subversive body of work that continues to inspire generations of artists and activists around the world.