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Lot Essay
"I never shot at God. I shot at the church. I glorify the Cathedral."
(Saint Phalle, 1981, quoted in S. Groom (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle , 2008, p.11).
In 1962, a year after the invention of her shooting paintings (Tirs) in which she entered the international art world with a literal 'bang', Niki de Saint Phalle embarked upon her Cathdrale pictures. These works, which also rehearsed the shooting performances of her earlier target paintings, succeeded in emphasizing Saint Phalle's Nouveau Realist engagement with the socio-political issues of her day whilst concisely articulating the tenuous divisions inherent within her entire oeuvre between the sacred and profane, personal and political.
An assemblage of seemingly precariously stacked found objects splattered with blood-like pain, the present lot creates two parallel towers with guns anxiously pointed at each other. However, in this instance the symbolism of Cathdrale bares testimony to the political tensions that were concurrently being played out in The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This political breakdown (before the opening of the New York-Moscow hotline of June 1963) encapsulated the modern dilemma of a fractured society which was on the verge of annihilating itself through communicative deadlock. Speaking of her target assemblages, Saint Phalle describes her act of shooting the work as an almost cathartic response to her socio-political environment 'I was shooting at my own violence and the VIOLENCE of the times.' (Saint Phalle, quoted in S. Groom (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle, 2008, p.60). Cathdrale negotiates an ambivalent space between personal response to the patriarchal structures entrenched within organized religion, and a political comment on world-wide contemporary issues
(Saint Phalle, 1981, quoted in S. Groom (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle , 2008, p.11).
In 1962, a year after the invention of her shooting paintings (Tirs) in which she entered the international art world with a literal 'bang', Niki de Saint Phalle embarked upon her Cathdrale pictures. These works, which also rehearsed the shooting performances of her earlier target paintings, succeeded in emphasizing Saint Phalle's Nouveau Realist engagement with the socio-political issues of her day whilst concisely articulating the tenuous divisions inherent within her entire oeuvre between the sacred and profane, personal and political.
An assemblage of seemingly precariously stacked found objects splattered with blood-like pain, the present lot creates two parallel towers with guns anxiously pointed at each other. However, in this instance the symbolism of Cathdrale bares testimony to the political tensions that were concurrently being played out in The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This political breakdown (before the opening of the New York-Moscow hotline of June 1963) encapsulated the modern dilemma of a fractured society which was on the verge of annihilating itself through communicative deadlock. Speaking of her target assemblages, Saint Phalle describes her act of shooting the work as an almost cathartic response to her socio-political environment 'I was shooting at my own violence and the VIOLENCE of the times.' (Saint Phalle, quoted in S. Groom (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle, 2008, p.60). Cathdrale negotiates an ambivalent space between personal response to the patriarchal structures entrenched within organized religion, and a political comment on world-wide contemporary issues