"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle

"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle.
Mosaic work: stones, mirror pieces, tiles etc...

       Niki de Saint Phalle was born on the 29th of October 1930 and she died on the 21rst of May 2002. She was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. She was one of the few women artists widely known for monumental sculpture.

       She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and education, which she wrote about decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received world-wide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers.

       Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life. Read more...

Backside views of "Ricardo Cat"

Inside and up-close views of Niki De Saint Phalle's "Ricardo Cat"