Niki de St. Phalle

ABOUT THE PROJECT

For seven years I had the incredible opportunity to build, first furniture and then artwork for the late French artist, Niki de St Phalle. Many of Niki’s works are of large playful figures and she has done several outdoor sculpture gardens including the Tarot Garden in Italy and the Queen Califia’s Magic circle in Escondido. Niki had never used wood in her work but was very enthusiastic about using a new material. Some of the first pieces that I produced were wooden cores to be painted or covered with other materials, but latter Niki wanted to see the grain and figure of the wood.  She also wanted to have the piece in bright colors, typical to her style. We used transparent dyes to achieve this. Most of the time the pieces that she wanted to do were not in the normal scope of what is done in wood.  This includes both structure and finishing. I found myself constantly saying,” let me think about this and see if I can figure a way to build the piece or make the wood do that and still be strong”. The snake chairs took months to engineer the structure, joints and shape so the chair would be strong, reliable, but also comfortable and have the sculptured form and style that was Niki.

PROJECT DETAILS

Client:

Niki de St. Phalle
Task:
Build Artwork for a Sculpture Garden
Skills:
Wood Sculpting

This was the first batch of snake chairs I produced. These were donated by niki and sent to Basil Switzerland to be part of the restaurant in the new Jean Tinguely Museum. 27”x27”x53”

This is one of the bird chairs and you can see the different layers of wood glued up. The wood is African mahogany, an orange color, but after final sanding, the wood is then bleached white so it can show the dye color as bright as possible. The beak on this chair is gilded in gold leaf. 20”x22”x68”

This is a close up of one of the painted maquettes from Noah’s Art Sculpture garden in Jerusalem. 4”x6”x2.5”

These are a few of the Maguettes: a large snake chair, and patterns used for the chairs.

Like the large snake chair, this was from and earlier work of Niki that she wanted to try in wood. Dave Carr, another woodworker and myself made a series of these mirrors, some were painted and others were dyed bright colors. Another artist Pierre Marie in France made the Millaflore medallions. 6”x35”x22”

These are some of the snake chairs and bird chairs that were built for Niki and are shown around her dinning room table. The Bird chairs are built up in what is called stacked lamination. They have mortise and tendon joints where the “stacks” change direction (at the legs, tail and seat and body). The snake chairs are laminated and glued using epoxy and 1/4” thick wood sections. They are bent over a huge jig using over 150 champs to get the wood to go where it needed to. Both chairs are dyed for color, finished and have glass, jewels and Italian millaflore medallions inserted in mastic to allow for expansion.