Now known as one of the most innovative and expressive artists of the twentieth century, Niki de Saint Phalle spent her entire life committed to experimental art, and from a very young age was able to create a unique world around herself that meant that she was prone to dreamlike imaginings that she would later try to capture through sculpture and painting. Her life was one in which she sought out the means to express her inner self through new mediums, and right up until her death in 2002, she was constantly pushing back the boundaries of what was possible in art.

Niki de Saint Phalle is often closely associated with the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali, thanks to their shared era and the fact that they were both keen to abstract their art as pure expression rather than restraining themselves to representing emotion and ideas to metaphorical use of real world things.

While some people see a simplicity and naivety in much of Saint Phalle’s earlier work, it was during this period in her career that she was arguably at her most confrontational. She experimented more with the world around her, attempting to create art from action. She is particularly well known for the bullet paintings that she made at the time, in which she would fire a gun into a paint bucket suspended above a canvas, using the resultant splashes as an expression of her emotion. These powerful paintings, which are completely unlike the work of any other artist, are highly sought after to this day.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Saint Phalle became increasingly influenced by the use of color in the work of the legendary Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, and she spent a great deal of time perfecting her own abstract sculptures, which took many of the organic design cues from Gaudi’s work, and twisted them into a more abstract, yet still earthy form that made them extremely interesting and evocative.

While the work of Niki de Saint Phalle is now often imitated and displayed as corporate art, the inspiration and expression that it represents, coupled with the freedom of thought that went into it, the only true way to experience it is in a city scape where the flowing lines of the sculptures juxtapose with the brutality of the urban environment to create an incredible contradiction of light and color.

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