NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE (1930-2002)

In her early career, Niki de Saint Phalle gained fame and notoriety for her performances involving the use of firearms; unloading freely into hated male avatars and bags of paint, causing colourful explosions while playing with ideas around the machismo of painting. She became the only female accepted into the Nouveau Réalisme  movement after its founder, Pierre Restany, attended one of her ‘shoot-outs’. Following her entrée into the art world as an avant-garde provocateur, she remains best known for her next series of sculptures; the Nana’s, which would occupy her for the rest of her life. The Nana’s (a slightly derogatory French term for young women), and their accompanying animals which co-exist within the same universe, are brightly coloured and curvaceous. This particular bird sculpture was a gift to her partner at the time; film director Peter Whitehead. The pair collaborated together in 1972 to make Daddy. The film is filled with Freudian symbols and its narration is highly psychoanalytical, it acts as a precursor to the shocking revelations made about her relationship with her father in her 1993 autobiography, Mon Secret.