Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
Arthur Rimbaud, extract from « Adieu », in A Season in Hell, April-August 1873, as translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.
Exhibitions are born for thousands of reasons and one of them is sometimes a matter of friendship. From time to time, it is a question of elective affinity, this complex process that takes root in the history of medieval alchemy «to explain the attraction and fusion of bodies». (1) For my part, I have never wanted an exhibition to be too explicitly a slave to a subject. On the contrary, I prefer that it allows us to mix artworks that then become like beings and which, in some cases, produce a new aesthetic material, at the heart of the athanor. We do experiments, we do exhibitions, not presentations. We tell stories. It is all about letting your mind waver, like when you walk from gallery to gallery on a weekday with your fists in your pockets. Anger, drunkenness, snapshot of contrasts.

But at the local café, we realize that galleries are perhaps like borders, beaches or cliffs at the corner of the street, that separate us from the mainland of our urban boredom. Rare places in the city where anything remains possible.
From this beach, therefore, it seemed possible to show something of the bowels of this great golden ship, with multicolored flags, of which Rimbaud speaks.

Let the artists invent this excavation, in the present, all in the same boat: when it runs aground and breaks open, they invent themselves. So yes, come new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. Let everything connect on the immaterial sand of the gallery. Whether they are known or not, it doesn’t matter, since they recognize each other. Careers, all mixed up, are as many fantastic journeys as history forgets, transforms into legends, or into posterity. This great golden vessel moves away obliquely as one approaches it: it multiplies and pulverizes to float better, like an intuition.

This was the first public action by Niki de Saint Phalle, her very first « Tir. » Niki herself recounted that next to her work was a large white piece by Bram Bogart. Upon seeing it, the artist got the idea of « making the artwork bleed.« She began to work frenetically and invited, only a few days later, Pierre Restany to attend a shooting-painting session done with a rifle. She was then immediately incorporated by the art critic into the Nouveaux Réalistes movement. He also invited her to have her own first solo show in Paris.

This is how she came to present her first « Tirs » during the exhibition « Tir à volonté » at Galerie J where Leo Castelli, Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg were present, alongside numerous actors from the international art scene of the time. The international career of the artist was then launched with exhibitions in Los Angeles (Dwan Gallery), Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum), and New York (Iolas Gallery.)
Each step of this burgeoning career is represented in the exhibition by major works which have punctuated it, from the miniature « landscape-assemblages » from 1958, to Portrait of my lover and the large Grand Tir – Séance de la Galerie J from
1961, the famous Pirodactyl over New York (the last big « Tir assemblage » realised in 1962) the studies for the big King Kong from 1963 today at the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, or even the Hearts and Cathedrals which figure a return to narration in this singular oeuvre.
This first magical moment (there will be others in her long career) lasted for five dazzling years. These are the years we chose to present in this exhibition. It follows shortly after the publication of Catherine Francblin’s biography of Niki de Saint Phalle, the first official biography of the artist to be published in French, who will be signing her book on the opening night.
The exhibition is also accompanied by a trilingual catalogue published for the occasion, written by Dr. Norbert Nobis, Catherine Francblin, Michelle Grabner (curator of the next Whitney Biennial) and Jacques Villeglé; this catalogue is published in collaboration with the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation which will host the exhibition in February 2014 in Hannover, a city where Niki de Saint Phalle’s work is very present, particularly in the collections of the Sprengel Museum.