KIKI SMITH (B. 1954)
1996
Etching on Paper
plate size 17 ¾” x 23 ½”

“Prints mimic what we are as humans. We are all the same and yet everyone is different. I also think there’s a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.” Kiki Smith

These disembodied werewolf hands are like one of those vestigial images that haunt our collective unconscious. Do they emerge from a dream, a fairy tale, the ghost of primordial man? Smith’s profound knowledge of the mechanics, the craft and materials of art-making, is evident in the visceral quality of her prints. At the same time, they offer, as palimpsests of human experience, a spiritual resonance.

As the critic Faye Hirsch wrote, “More than any other artist working in print, Smith has brought out in the medium a kind of physicality that is not its most ready association. No matter how surreal the presentation—breasts as moons or faces as stars—the works never entirely shed their material origins, and it is in this materiality that Smith seems to find relief from mortal constraints.”

Signed in pencil, “Kiki Smith 1996”. From the edition of 38.