Kiki Smith was born in Nurnberg in 1954 to an artistic family: her mother an opera singer and her father Minimalist artist Tony Smith. Her work is characterised by a constant reflection on human existence and on life and death; and her drawings of the human body, which are both traumatic and poetic. She reached international recognition at the end of the 1980s. In 2006-2007, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York organised a touring retrospective exhibition, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005", which signalled the end of a period.