Kiki Smith & Lebbeus Woods - Description

Kiki Smith & Lebbeus Woods, installation view.

Kiki Smith (b.1954 Nuremberg, Germany) is an artist of international prominence whose career has spanned over three decades. She is a leading figure among artists addressing philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature. Her explorations of the human condition, the body, and the realms of spirituality and nature have resulted in works of exceptional power and beauty spanning mediums from sculpture and printmaking to installation and textiles

 

Lebbeus Woods,May 31, 1940 October 30, 2012,was a revolutionary, experimental, and theoretical architect. He is regarded as the most original architectural visionary alive today. Woods’ work is primarily focused on theorizing architecture in places in crisis. Many of the buildings/structures which Lebbeus Woods has designed push the limits of the possible and test the beholder/occupant in their strident, often uncomfortable, resolution for a new form of existence. His buildings often look like machines, though they could be either. There is no trace of utopia  except a failed utopia  in these structures, in which bourgeois comforts and complacency are filtered out. The Berlin Free-Zone project was an example of this, in which machine-like ‘buildings’ are set within the area where the Berlin Wall once stood. Many of his more recent designs are more abstract and are attempts to create ‘buildings without walls’, partly in opposition to the neoliberal dream of privatized spaces.