Kiki Smith - Hearing You with My Eyes - 2020

Kiki Smith - Hearing You With My Eyes
2020 The Foundation of the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts of Lausanne and Scheidegger & Spiess
Softcover with a transparent, printed cloth cover.
Format 21 x 16.5 cm, 192 pages
in mint condition

The work of American artist Kiki Smith centers on the human body. Smith, born in 1954, has throughout her life as an artist engaged with the body in every possible way, and that yields remarkable art.

Hearing You with My Eyes is the title of the catalog that accompanies the exhibition of the same name, which was on view until January 2021 at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, and it has become a magnificent book, with stunning illustrations that provide a good insight into the complex oeuvre of this remarkable artist – drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures. In everything, you must take the time and allow what you see to sink in.

If you see what forty years of focusing on the body in varied art has yielded, you'll also start looking at and listening to your body differently. You might not say it right away, but the way Smith slowly shifts from the details of the human body to the whole, and then to the interaction with the world, is impressive and sensitive at the same time.

Your own senses are engaged when you look at this art, and that is rarer than you might think. The book mainly leaves you wanting more, and makes the absence of the real exhibition all the more keen. Moreover, I would like to see many more drawings by Smith. The perfect catalog, then, one that whets the appetite for more.