Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful! – The women of Niki de Saint Phalle

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New edition of the catalog initially published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois gallery from September 8 to October 21, 2017.

Designed in the form of a “women’s magazine”, the Belles! Beautiful! Beautiful! The Women of Niki de Saint Phalle is dedicated to the representation of the female body in the innovative, feminist and avant-garde work of Niki de Saint Phalle.

Edited by Marianne Le Métayer and Catherine Francblin.
Texts from:
Pilar Albaracin, Aya Cissoko, Marc Donnadieu, Valérie Donzelli, Caroline Eliacheff, Catherine Francblin, Ann Hindry, Jean de Loisy, Marianne Le Métayer, Camille Morineau, Catherine Millet, Lucia Pesapane, Naja Rasmussen, Germain Viatte.

Graphic design: Amélie Boutry.

Published in May 2022

Bilingual edition French English

Dimensions: 22 x 31 cm (paperback), 184 illustrated pages

“Lacan claimed that woman does not exist. He must have known Niki de Saint Phalle. Because in the artist's work the woman is not one, but several. Tall and muscular, plump and hairy, old and fragile, filthy shrews, sylph brides, pot-wives, belly-women skinned alive, light giantesses dancing and whirling, white matrons, black matrons, Niki turned her back on the ideal beauty to paint and sculpt all possible and impossible types of women, all kinds of unusual, disturbing female morphologies, attesting that beauty is always bizarre.
Dealing with the feminine, in fact, exposing its anxieties and its revolts, its dreams, its power and its poetry, always amounts for the artist to staging bodies. (...) Everything that women are given to experience is then embodied in her figures which deviate both from ordinary patterns of representation and from the solemn principles consecrated by social morality."
Catherine Francblin

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Niki de Saint Phalle (Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint-Phalle, 1930-2002), visual artist, painter, engraver, sculptor and Franco-American director famous in particular for her monumental “Nanas”, left behind her a protean, feminist work, exuberant and avant-garde, at the crossroads of Pop Art, New Realism and Neo-Dada, made of performance paintings, sculptures and even psychoanalytic films.

And undoubtedly explains why his work, until recently, seemed doomed to a certain marginality.

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