Big Work, Big Feelings, Big Sculptures: A Look at Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle is one of those artists people like to describe with extremes—radical, chaotic, wild, visionary. And while some of that is true, the reality is that she was also just deeply committed to figuring things out through her work. She didn’t operate from a carefully laid-out career plan. She followed instinct. And her instincts took her to some pretty incredible places.

She started making art in the 1950s, not because she needed something to do, but because she needed a way to survive herself. She was already living a very different kind of life—she modeled for fashion magazines, posed for high-end designers, looked like someone who had it all together. Then she had a full-blown breakdown. And from there, something else started to take shape.

Her early work wasn’t subtle. It didn’t ask for permission. She created a series of performance-based paintings where she literally shot paint onto canvases using rifles. These weren’t metaphors. They were actions—violent, raw, unfiltered. She called them “Tirs,” or “shooting paintings,” and they marked the beginning of her refusal to play nice with the expectations placed on women, on artists, or on anyone who’s ever tried to fit into a neat category.

As her practice evolved, she moved toward sculpture. Not the polite kind that sits quietly in a corner. These were large, loud, and full of curves. Her “Nanas,” those big, dancing female figures, are what most people associate with her now. They’re bright and joyful and exaggerated in ways that make them hard to look away from. They have thick thighs, huge breasts, unapologetic bellies. They spin, they leap, they occupy space like they were born to. And they make a lot of people uncomfortable.

There is nothing delicate about them. But they aren’t crude either. They are celebratory. Not of the female body in some idealized, untouchable way, but of bodies that actually exist. Bodies that move, age, expand, contract, take up room, and still dance.

Critics didn’t always know what to do with her. She was too decorative for the intellectuals. Too intense for the commercial world. Too weird for the mainstream. But the public loved her. Kids loved her. People who didn’t feel at home in the art world loved her. She made work that could be climbed on, walked through, touched, and experienced, and she did it long before “immersive art” became a marketing category.

In the 1970s, she started building what would become one of her most important projects: the Tarot Garden in Tuscany. This was a lifelong commitment. She worked on it for over twenty years. It’s a massive outdoor sculpture park filled with massive structures based on tarot cards. Many are covered in mosaic tiles, mirrors, and wild color palettes. She lived inside one of the sculptures while she worked on the rest.

It’s impossible to ignore the labor involved in her process. She worked with fiberglass, concrete, metal—materials that are difficult and exhausting to manipulate. She continued to create even as she dealt with chronic illness. The scale of her work wasn’t a stunt. It was the size she needed in order to say what she wanted to say.

Her pieces often feel joyful at first glance. And they are. But they’re not one-note. Underneath the color and pattern is a deep confrontation with pain, trauma, and social violence. She dealt with personal abuse, with public violence, with the ways women are diminished and flattened out in culture. None of that is hidden, but it’s not turned into spectacle either. She layered it into forms that feel alive, playful, and even absurd, without ever losing their seriousness.

Niki didn’t stay in one lane. She made books, films, and architectural structures. She worked across mediums because she didn’t see a reason not to. Her practice was expansive because her imagination didn’t have tight borders. She understood that art could be public and personal at the same time, and she didn’t treat that as a contradiction. She treated it as an opportunity.

There’s a reason people still feel pulled toward her work. It’s emotional. Physical. Visceral. It shows what it looks like when someone follows their ideas all the way through, no matter how messy, ambitious, or overwhelming they become. And maybe that’s what makes it so compelling.