For its 50th anniversary, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, an indoor and outdoor complex on one edge of Piedmont Park, has decided to meld the natural world with the manmade by revisiting the work of an artist whose work graced its spaces 20 years ago, the late Niki de Saint Phalle.
Titled “Niki in the Garden,” this second, revived exhibition — I remember well the 2006 exhibition of her work —spreads out from the giant conservatory to the ABG’s many formal and informal garden spaces, all of which are adorned by large-scale works by an artist who was born in Paris but eventually lived in California, where she died in 2002.
Because she very often worked on such an enormous scale and in such vibrant colors, a sculpture by Niki, as she preferred to be called, is impossible to miss. Inside each sculpture is a steel armature over which is stretched a synthetic “skin” whose surface is decorated with paint or pieces of glass, mirror or tile arranged to form mosaic patterns. During the day and at night when they are accentuated by spot lights, the 40 sculptures now on view in the gardens glisten and glow.
A good example would be “Les Trois Graces,” a grouping installed in one of the ponds. A number of artists including Sandro Botticelli and Peter Paul Rubens, have painted images of these mythological maidens, attendants of the goddess Aphrodite. Representing the qualities of charm, beauty and creativity, they are generally depicted in a gentle dance.
Leaning much more to the robust, full-figured females of which Rubens was so fond, Nicki’s minor goddesses cavort with abandon, each one in her own zone of performance.
Niki de Saint Phalle credited the visionary work of architect Antonio Gaudi, whose cathedral to the Holy Family is still under construction in Barcelona a century after his death, for inspiring her use of diverse materials to construct monumental sculpture. Banishing the straight line almost entirely from his work, Gaudi created unusual forms replicating, as much as possible, the randomness of nature.
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