KIKI SMITH — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1994

Kiki Smith, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Billy Rose Pavilion, Spring–Summer 1994. Curated by Suzanne Landau. Staple-bound exhibition brochure; 14 pages, 21 × 27 cm; colour and black-and-white offset printing. English and Hebrew.

A compact bilingual publication produced for Kiki Smith’s 1994 exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, documenting sculpture, works on paper and installation from a period when her treatment of the body was expanding into more symbolic and mythological territory.

Across the brochure, figures are curled, fragmented, dispersed and physically handled. Process photographs show Smith arranging body-like forms and fragments on the floor, while other works move between cast figure, skin, clothing and residue. The emphasis is not only on finished sculpture, but on how bodily forms are made, positioned and transformed.

Smith’s work repeatedly unsettles the idea of the body as a stable image. Here, the body shifts between material, sculpture and symbolic form, while the brochure translates those temporary arrangements into numbered images and institutional record. Body → fragment → object → installation → photograph → publication.

The Jerusalem context adds another layer. By this point Smith was increasingly drawing on mythological and religious female figures, including Lilith, which belongs to this exhibition moment. The physical body and the symbolic body begin to sit alongside one another.

The publication itself remains modest: fourteen pages, stapled binding, bilingual text and a photographic detail of Mother’s Coat across the wrappers. That slight format is part of its appeal. A significant institutional exhibition survives through a relatively minor piece of museum print.

For The New Rare, the interest lies in that movement between states: body, sculpture, installation, image, brochure. The work changes form, but something of its original charge remains attached to each new support.

Condition: Good. General handling and surface wear to wrappers, with light edge and corner wear and minor creasing consistent with age. Original later price/inventory label retained to Hebrew-language cover. Internally generally clean from the pages inspected.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.