Niki De Saint Phalle Foundation

b. Neuilly Sur Seine, France, 29 October 1930, d. San Diego, CA, USA, 21 May 2002

Niki de Saint Phalle is a Franco-American artist who began her career as a painter in 1950. Her work quickly moved towards assemblages, reliefs, and sculpture. In 1961, she became a member of the Nouveaux Réalistes group. The Tirs [Shootings] from the early 1960s were quickly followed in 1965 by the sexy, curvaceous, feminine sculptures she called Nanas. Then her art moved to exterior spaces with large, bright, colourful sculptures, some of which created in collaboration with Jean Tinguely: Le Cyclop in Milly-la-Forêt, La Fontaine Stravinsky next to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and her masterpiece The Tarot Garden in Italy.

The first retrospective was dedicated to Niki de Saint Phalle's work was held at the Pompidou Centre, Paris in 1980. Recently, her work has been exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014, at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2020, and at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the MCASD in San Diego in 2022. Her works are included in some very prestigious museum collections: the Pompidou Centre, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.; the MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.