Niki de Saint Phalle - Sculptor and Painter

 

"Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle" Born 1930 in France, her father was French, her mother American, the second of five children from a wealthy family who lost their fortune in the stock market collapse.
She spent most of her childhood and adolescence in New York, in an early display of her later artistic temperament, she paints the fig leaves of her convent school's classical sculptures red, she is transferred to a new school shortly after.

As a young woman Niki's first career is as a fashion model, with photographs appearing in Vogue and Life, at 18 she elopes with childhood friend Harry Mathews. In 1950, Niki begins making her first paintings while her husband studies music at Harvard University. Laura, their first child, is born  in 1951. In 1952 she moves to Paris to study theatre and acting while Harry studies music. In 1953 after being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown Niki finds that painting helps her to overcome this crisis and decides to give up acting and become an artist.
Following her recovery she briefly returns to Paris, where she is encouraged by other artists to continue painting in her unique self-taught style.
In Spain, Niki discovers the work of Antonio Gaudí and is deeply affected, especially by Park Güell in Barcelona, which plants the idea to create her own sculpture garden and inspires her to use diverse materials and found objects as essential elements in her art.

She is perhaps best known for  her "shooting paintings"  -  complex assemblages with concealed paint containers that are shot by pistol or rifle. The impact of the projectile creates spontaneous effects which finish the work. The shooting paintings evolve to include elements of spectacle and performance. Niki becomes part of the Nouveau Réalisme group of artists, being the only woman in a group that includes Arman, Christo, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques de la Villeglé, among others.
Niki has her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1961.

("I was shooting at myself and society with its injustices. I was shooting at my own violence and the violence of the times.")

After the "Shooting paintings" came a period when she explored the various roles of woman, she made life size dolls of women giving birth, usually dressed in white, they were primarily made of polyester with a wire framework, generally created from papier mâché. 

Inspired by the pregnancy of her friend Clarice Rivers, the wife of American artist Larry Rivers, she began to use her artwork to consider archetypal female figures in relation to her thinking on the position of women in society. Her artistic expression of the proverbial everywoman were named "Nanas". These large-scale, outrageous and colourful sculptures have appeared in museums, advertisements and worldwide exhibitions. (The word "nana" is French for "dame" or "chick.")
Niki's first permanent architectural project was a private commission for a summer residence in the south of France, completed in 1971. She begins to develop other "fantastic" architectural projects that require intensive planning and organization. She travels to India and Egypt and the world over broadening the repertoire of cultural experiences and visual associations used in her work.

Three of the large-scale Nanas  situated in a permanent site near the town hall in Hannover, Germany. The city named them Sophie, Charlotte, and Caroline in honor of three historically distinguished queens of Hannover.

Her career as an Artist continued until 2001 and involved sculpture, architecture and also writing and illustrating a book ( AIDS: You Can't Catch It Holding Hands. )( In collaboration with Dr. Silvio Barandun )
Her work is internationally acknowledged and accepted, she is one of the most and famous female artists of the 20^th century and has been a major figure in contemporary art, vivacious, inventive, original and open minded.

Niki de Saint Phalle died on May 21, 2002, at the age of 71 in La Jolla, California.

Zanele Muholi (Umlazi, South Africa)

A visual artist an activist. Who co-founded “The Forum for the Empowerment of Women“ an organisation dedicated to providing a safe space for women. Muholi has developed her art as a protest against the many ways of discrimination that she, and the women around her have suffered for reasons of colour, gender and sexual orientation.
In her personality it is possible to appreciate the struggle that the black majority has gone through in a country like South Africa. Her main objective is to fight for the denounce of the practice of "corrective rape" against black women in her country. The main thing to realize when one goes deep into her work is the courage she shows in every one of her pieces. She refuses to stay quiet about the situation in South Africa and in her images she is able to show that love is not only a natural thing but something that should be respected and admired, something nobody should die or be abused for. Zanele is one of those artists that has the courage of standing up and telling the truth and the best thing about this is that she is able to do it in such a beautiful way. (Daniela)

Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou....was born in 1931, daughter of a salesman, she studied Art and Metal welding. She was a popular figure in the new York art world from the late 1950s mainly due to her unique constructions, sculptures and intense drawings.
Bontecou was not particularly interested in art until she went to college.
She began experimenting with black in drawings. She began creating soot drawings by employing an acetylene torch but turning down the oxygen to create a uniquely deep black. The black had depth and a velvet look that slowly graduated. The drawings that Bontecou created using this technique were called "worldscapes." This discovery changed the way she looked at her world. In Italy, she also created some animals, birds, and people in semi abstract form primarily in terra cotta but also a few cast in bronze.
She continued to experiment with black in drawings. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she also moved from worldscapes to bigger constructions with black still a key feature. Her first important works in the art world were wall constructions fabricated primarily from found objects, living above a laundry she used worn out laundry conveyor belts made of heavy canvas as well as canvas, muslin, airplane parts, industrial saw tooths and black velvet, Bontecou sewed or constructed these materials together with copper wire on steel frames.
By the early 1960s Bontecou was regarded as a connection between 1950s Abstract Expressionism, pop art and minimalism that was becoming popular in the 1960s. She continued to create constructions, welding frames into shapes and attaching found materials to it. Many of her works in this time period featured handles, grommets, canvas straps, and other materials available at hardware stores and Army surplus stores. Bontecou's works in this time period included "The Prisons," which consisted of small rectangular metal pieces, and 1961's "Untitled," which had iron bars forming a vertical grid with a figure trapped behind them. Museums began buying her work, and she was included in a 1961 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, The Age of Assemblage.
Bontecou's other works in this time period were also influenced by airplanes and their materials. In addition being more streamlined, aerodynamic, and full of metallic elements, many of her canvas works featured panels that were tinted in shades of greys and blacks. She also began using hardwood and was sometimes influenced by architecture. Bontecou's sculptures continued to evolve from the abstract to include plants, insects, and under sea creatures in her forms. Though most of Bontecou's work consisted of constructions she always continued to draw.
Bontecou still showed her work through the early 1970s in New York, by this time she was experimenting with carving objects out of Styrofoam and placing them in a vacuum press, in this process she created plastic fish, flowers, and plants some of which were very large. One work from 1970 featured a plastic fish hanging from the ceiling with the tail of another fish in its mouth. Her comment on the way the world was changing and becoming very plastic was not well received at the time, though this social commentary was later regarded as meaningful, innovative, and political. Her last exhibit for many years came in 1971 and featured the plastic flowers and fish.

Her attitude changed after she suffered a life threatening illness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She suffered from aplastic anaemia a disease of the bone marrow, but was nursed back to health by her husband. This incident prompted her to assess the whole of her career, her work then featured skulls, skeletal structures, and animal bones in her delicate sculptures of wire, porcelain beads, and cloth with some colour, which she created in her private studio located in a barn on her farm. In 1993 Bontecou's profile was raised when the Los Angeles based Museum of Contemporary Art featured a retrospective of some of her work from the 1960s and 1970s, both reliefs and drawings that later moved to the Parrish Art Museum. It was her first show in many years. Bontecou did not organize it and none of her post early 1970s work was included. At the time she was adamant about not displaying her "new" work. The drawings involved strange jumblings of serene and
sinister, sensual and clinical, comical and foreboding, and all reflected Bontecou's odd penchant for mixing feminine with masculine and hybridizing attributes of the natural with those of the machine made and the machine itself."
Bontecou's work was described as ( sui generis ) entirely her own, in its constant oscillation between abstract and figurative, toughness and lyricism, the intimate and the infinite, the natural world and the world of her imagination.