Niki de Saint Phalle by Stefano Cecchetto
folio. pp. 192. profusely illustrated. paperback. Skira, 2010.
New in publisher's shrink wrap.
ISBN-10: 8857204618 / ISBN-13: 9788857204611
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The full range of Saint Phalle’s oeuvre is paid glorious tribute in this retrospective volume, which also features new images and an extended biography. Niki de Saint Phalle was an eclectic artist whose entire oeuvre strives to communicate the message that art is not a linear course of growth and perfecting, but a continuous quest for sensations. She was an artist who poured mythology, creative energy, feminist ideology, personal anxieties, political demands, a call for freedom and a breaking of the mold into her work. This catalogue recreates the course of her development with attention to the chronology of the events from the Shooting Paintings, the expression of the great unrest of those years, and the Nanas, in which the artist attempts to recreate the realm of childhood, to the Tarot Garden in Garavicchio, in which Saint Phalle wed her artistic language to the language of architecture, and the Spiritual Path of her Californian Diary.