MUDEC, Milan, Italy
October 5, 2024 – February 16, 2025
The Museo delle Culture di Milano (MUDEC) opens a major exhibition on the life and work of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). It will form the first comprehensive retrospective of the world-renowned Franco-American artist in an Italian museum.
During her life and career De Saint Phalle became a prominent pioneer of Post-War Art through her fantastical world of vibrantly colorful drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations in which she explored themes of femininity and feminism, identity and activism
Throughout eight sections the exhibition explores her artistic life from her earliest to her latest works. Together they will display the enormous versatility of her practice by showing her prowess as a fashion icon, painter, sculpture, filmmaker and performer. Simultaneously the different rooms will contribute to a balanced reading of De Saint Phalle’s life, with on the one hand the image of her as a glamorous master of her own universe and on the other her life of trauma and frailty and her deeply personal and intellectual confrontation with the social equalities and discrimination she witnessed and experienced which became essential to the potency of her art.
Three works by De Saint Phalle from the collection of Gallery Delaive were given on loan to be included in the exhibition. The three sculptures from the 80s and 90s will form a strong addition to the curatorial narrative which highlights the life and practice of this groundbreaking and artist and woman.
The exhibition will be on view from October 5, 2024 – February 16, 2025
