Rating and value of works, drawings, paintings by Niki de Saint Phalle

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Rating and value of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle     

Niki de Saint Phalle is a well-known artist among modern and contemporary art lovers. Now, prices for her works are rising at the auctioneers' gavel.

Her oils on canvas are particularly prized, especially by American buyers, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €5 to €800,000, a significant delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to the artist's works.

In 2024, his work The White Goddess (mixed media) dating from 1963 sold for €250,000, whereas it was estimated at between €100,000 and €150,000. Its value has risen sharply. 

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The works and style of Nikki de Saint Phalle  

Nikki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002)is an avant-garde French artist known for her provocative, colorful works. Her style is immediately recognizable, marked by an explosion of color, volume and organic forms.

Her work is at the crossroads of Pop Art, neo-Dadaism and Art Brut, with a strong committed and feminist dimension. She rejects the classical canons, and adopts an exuberant visual language, nourished by mythology, politics and personal narratives.

She uses a wide variety of materials : papier-mâché, polyester, resin, wire mesh, polyurethane foam, found objects and acrylic paint. She often works in assemblage, modelling or projection (as in Tirs).

She favours forms in the round, often hollow or modular, sometimes monumental and always expressive. She creates an emblematic series in which she fires a rifle at pockets of paint incorporated into plaster assemblages.

Violence becomes a creative gesture, art born of shock and shattering. Her performative act is filmed, and denounces official art, patriarchy and questions the role of the artist.

She created the Nanas from 1964, which are monumental sculptures of cheerful, dancing, round women in bold colors. She uses light materials (polystyrene, resin) covered with naive or abstract decorative motifs.

She affirms a free, powerful and anti-normative female body, in a kind of plastic feast. She created many large-scale works, including the Stravinsky Fountain, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the Hanover Grotto.

Niki de Saint Phalle conceived immersive environments, somewhere between fantastic architecture, habitable sculpture and fairy tale. Her monumental art remains accessible, playful and close to the public, a political will on her part.

Her palette is flamboyant and non-hierarchical (primary tones, black, white, glittery pink, gold). Decorative motifs (spirals, flowers, checkerboards, stars) create a festive, repetitive style. Ornamentation becomes a message of optimism, energy and resistance.

Her work is a permanent blend of sculpture, painting, performance, architecture and writing that lies at the crossroads of genres. For her, art is a means of healing, intimate expression and political protest. Her practice integrates illness, trauma and dreams, while remaining focused on joy.

The life of Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002) was an iconoclastic and committed artist. Born Catherine Marie Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in Neuilly sur Seine into an aristocratic Franco-American family, her childhood was marked by family tensions and a rape by her father, which she later publicly denounced.

She spent her adolescence in the United States, and briefly began a modeling career in the 1940s, notably for Vogue and Life. After a nervous breakdown in the 1950s, she discovered art as a therapy and taught herself.

She was inspired by Dubuffet, Pollock, Gaudi, le Facteur Cheval and non-Western art. Early on, she adopted a radical outsider stance, both critical of patriarchy and free of academic norms. She made a name for herself with her Tirs (1961 - 63), performances in which she fired a rifle at assemblages containing pockets of paint.

Niki de Saint Phalle became a leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme, close to Jean Tinguely, whom she married in 1971, but also d'Arman, César, Spoerri, etc.

His Nanas went on to embody an instinctive, sensual and uncomplicated feminism that was highly avant-garde for its time. These works brought her international fame, while identifying her for a long time with a pop and popular aesthetic.

She created numerous monumental projects, often collaborative, such as the Stravinsky Fountain (Paris, 1983, with Jean Tinguely), the Tarot Garden, and others, which express her desire for art accessible to all, inclusive and dreamlike.

Niki de Saint Phalle campaigns for women's rights, AIDS prevention, art education and mental health. She wrote and illustrated several art books for children, often in connection with her plastic work. She suffered from lung complications linked to the intensive use of resins and chemicals in her art, and died in 2002 in San Diego.

Her work is now recognized as one of the most singular of the 20th century, at the crossroads of the avant-garde and the popular. She is one of the women who overturned the codes of 20th-century art, like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo or Lynne Drexler.

Focus on Hon, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1966

This is one of her major and most provocative works, created in collaboration with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt at Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 1966. The monumental sculpture-installation measures 28 meters long and 6 meters high.

It uses industrial materials, wire mesh, foam and acrylic paint, creating a temporary yet immersive structure. The vivid primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and large areas of contrasting paint and solids create an aesthetic reminiscent of the Nans, but on a monumental scale and with architectural ambition.

The forms are curved, sensual and exaggerated, evoking fertility, generosity and a subversive maternal energy. The work is provocative and political, as woman is no longer an object of gaze but a sacred and habitable space.

Her feminist gesture is radical, celebrating the power of the female body without taboo or euphemism. The installation offers a multisensory experience, where we walk, observe and interact. It blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, theater and performance. It is a work designed to be ephemeral, challenging the idea of the timelessness of monumental art.

Public success was immediate: over 100,000 visitors in just a few weeks, a scandal among critics and curators, who denounced it as vulgar, excessive or blasphemous. It was a seminal work in Niki de Saint Phalle's career.

Her signature

Niki de Saint Phalle's works are not all signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of her signature:

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