Kiki Smith
Woven Worlds
Malmö, 26.4 2025 – 12.10 2025
KIKI SMITH
WOVEN WORLDS
26.4 – 12.10 2025
Curator: Elisabeth Millqvist, Moderna Museet Malmö and Jutta Mattern, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck
The exhibition is shown in the galleries on Floor 2
In this selection of works, Kiki Smith focuses our gaze on nature. Through intimate studies and fabulous fantasies, her weavings are populated by wolves, delicate butterflies, and shadowy bats. In the large-scale tapestries, measuring almost 300 x 200 cm, Smith adds silver thread to create a shimmering world of details. The layouts that the tapestries are based on are almost as large, consisting of collage in several layers, while her sculptures vary in material – from bronze with inlaid gemstones to porcelain with graphite.
Born in 1954, Kiki Smith has returned time and again throughout her career to the theme of the body and its internal organs. In “Woven Worlds”, we find an artist who turns her gaze outward – where the relationship between human, animal, and nature stands at the center as a cosmic totality.
“Art is just a way to think, Kiki Smith has said, and the exhibition allows us to truly follow her thoughts – how she reconfigures, develops, and populates her visual idiom,” says Elisabeth Millqvist, Director of Moderna Museet Malmö.
Kiki Smith is constantly exploring new techniques. The tapestries in the exhibition are created with computerised jacquard looms that make possible a complex color palette through a large number of warp threads. Smith compares machine weaving to printmaking, a way to duplicate motifs and create variations in editions.
Since the 1970s, Kiki Smith’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Haus der Kunst in Munich. “Woven Worlds” came into being through a close collaboration with the artist and on the initiative of Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Germany and curator Jutta Mattern. The exhibition has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro.
At Moderna Museet Malmö, “Woven Worlds” becomes a part of the museum’s ongoing investigation of artists who use varying entry points as they engage in questions of environment, nature, and transition.
