Ice Man (Primary Title)
Kiki Smith, American, born Germany, 1954 (Artist)
In making work that's about the body, I'm playing with the indestructibility of life, where life is this ferocious force that keeps propelling us. At the same time, . . . you can just piece it and it dies. --Kiki Smith
During the 1980s, as poignant responses to the AIDS crisis, Smith's sculptures addressed the degradation and disintegration of the human body. In the early '90s, she began focusing on the whole human figure and working in bronze. These developments reflected her wish to invest the European tradition of religous figurative art with fresh meaning.
Ice Man was inspired by the 1991 discovery of a 5300-year-old Stone Age man frozen in an Alpine glacier. The figure's isolated, atrophied form is an unlikely messenger of hope. But the work's mood of introspection and embrace of fragility suggest the preciousness of life, a life to which the figure appears to cling.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada, June 13 – September 29, 1996
Accessioned February 19, 2004. See VMFA Curatorial file.
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