Niki de Saint Phalle

The self-taught French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle became world renowned for her sculptures that blend influences of Dada, Surrealism, and the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí into sensual and vibrant formal compositions. Saint Phalle's famed “Nanas,” a symbol of the everywoman that she developed in the mid-1960s, are bulbous female figures that seem to dance off the ground. Inspired by a visit with artist Larry Rivers's pregnant wife, the Nanas ultimately signaled a major shift in Saint Phalle's artistic practice: although she had experimented with conceptual art in the '60s, Saint Phalle gravitated toward creating brightly colored, whimsical, and imaginative humanoid sculptures.

Saint Phalle often collaborated with her second husband, the famed Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, and her work, described as “at once avant-garde and populist” by the New York Times, has long appealed to a wide range of audiences. In fact, many of her massive sculptures appear in public spaces around the world. Her 20-year-long project, The Tarot Garden, in Tuscany, for instance, is a public park that Saint Phalle designed in a nod to Gaudí's treasured Park Güell in Barcelona.

Saint Phalle was born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in Paris in 1930 to a wealthy family of bankers. Saint Phalle largely grew up in New York after her family relocated because of the stock market crash of 1929. While she never attended art school, she began painting at age 23 and started showing her work regularly by 1961. She died in 2002 at the age of 71. Her works currently resides in numerous public locales: outside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and in a sculpture park at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, to name a couple. Her sculptures have also been placed with universities and museums throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.