Niki de saint phalle artwork

Niki de Saint Phalle paired bold, jubilant, and cartoonish feminine forms with dark and disturbing material in her multifaceted artistic career. Throughout, she continually disrupted long-held conventions in art, and her iconoclastic approach to her identity and society at large made her an early and important voice to both the Feminist movement and the development of early Conceptual Art.

Unlike many of her contemporaries who prioritized the idea behind the work of art rather than the aesthetic demonstration of the idea, Saint Phalle's pieces were highly expressive, visually bold, and often playful - a style that celebrated aesthetics instead of interrogating its structures and conventions. She realized some of the most ambitious, immersive sculptural environments of the 20 th century, and also made intensely personal, inward-looking work that reflected on her inner life and relationships.

Saint Phalle's broad influence is marked by the variety of contemporary cultural identities and communities that now 'claim' her as their own, including feminist, queer, and racial empowerment movements. After years of creating innovative art de Saint Phalle came upon a signature visual language that can now be found in various location in the world.

For example, her work created along with her partner Jean Tinguely enlivens The Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, which is located just to the side of the Center Pompidou. They were made by fixing polythene bags of paint to a board, and covering them with a thick plaster surface. Viewers were then invited to shoot a rifle at the surface, popping the bags and causing the paint to run down the textured white surface.

This particular work was shot at by a number of notable artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The process of creating the artwork became a live performative event done in the public eye and with the public's participation, challenging traditional perceptions of the artist as a solitary, hermetic figure. Shooting Paintings involve the viewer directly and physically in the creation of work, and leave the resulting image to chance.

Critic Craig Staff interprets the aggressive nature of these shooting pictures as representing the death of traditional painting as a medium.

Niki cannes

He claims "it is difficult not to interpret Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings iconoclastically and within a set of terms that unequivocally sought to negate, if not entirely bring down, the medium. They still retained many of the essentials of painting: a canvas as a blank ground, and paint constituting the form that populates the ground. The element of spectacle, particularly the arresting image of an attractive young girl wielding a gun as part of her art, was a crucial aspect of these performance-paintings.

The Tirs events drew personalities such as Jane Fonda, whose image as a young and beautiful political dissident of the state was also a media spectacle in the s.