With a selection of nearly one hundred pieces, some of which have never been shown in Europe before, the exhibition includes work the american artist made over the past forty years. It is organized around the theme of sensory perception, which has been central to Smith’s work yet little explored until now.

Since the early 1980s, Kiki Smith (born in 1954) has focused on the body and its functions, but also its symbolic meaning, status in social space, and representations. Having described the body fragment by fragment, Smith went on to tackle it as a whole starting with its envelope, the skin, then broadened her focus to examine humans’ relationship with the animal and plant kingdoms. This evolution from the microscopic to the macroscopic has always been stamped by the attention she has paid to the senses, and it is in light of these concerns that MCBA offers visitors the chance to discover or rediscover a body of work that has played out in a great variety of techniques.

Exhibition curator: Laurence Schmidlin, curator of contemporary art