Kiki Smith Prints and Multiples, 1985-1993

The Barbara Krakow Gallery is publishing a fully-illustrated catalog raisonne of Kiki Smith's prints & multiples, with an in-depth essay by Boston Globe art critic & ARTnews correspondent Nancy Stapen. This first-ever recording of a most important aspect of the artist's production will greatly contribute to the critical & historical dialogue surrounding the artist. The catalog includes twenty-five print works, six sculptural multiples & two artist's books. Works date from the artist's first Avocet Portfolio silkscreen in 1985 to her large-scale 1993 collaborations with well-known Long Island print publisher Universal Limited Art Editions. Formally editioned pieces such as these are paired with those of Smith's investigation of alternative print techniques, including photocopying, non-editioning & her use of "unique variants"--screens or blocks used in modular & always different ways & in varying scales: a challenge to 'editioning' itself. Kiki Smith's long-held interest in the vulnerable, hidden & frighteningly real aspects of the human body finds new avenues of meaning in prints & multiples, as it both caresses & attacks the media it investigates. In Smith's hands, print paper becomes a metaphor for skin & print techniques become profoundly varied ways of exploring the topography--& penetrating the surface--of that skin. Her multiples also, using materials as diverse as bronze, plaster, glass beads, wax, or produced in book form, testify to the artist's willingness, skillfulness & gutsiness in stretching & challenging that same metaphor. Viewers familiar with the artist's visceral, arresting, gut-wrenching sculptural practice, with its poetically surgical probe of the body's contents, will find that sensibility extended here; but they will also find it laced with another, opposing yet complimentary sensibility: a sensitivity & delicacy of touch & choice that offer both new & long-time viewers a unique & complex visual experience.Krakow, Barbara is the author of 'Kiki Smith Prints and Multiples, 1985-1993' with ISBN 9780963910608 and ISBN 0963910604.