Esse 100 — Comptes rendus Kiki Smith  Girl, 2014. Photo : courtesy of Lorcan O’Neill Gallery, Rome  Fortune, 2014. Photo : courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery, New York  Earth, 2012. Photo : courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery, New York  Underground, 2012. Photo : courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery, New York What I Saw on the Road is Kiki Smith’s first solo exhibi- tion at a public institution in Italy. It is a small show in the Pitti Palace’s Andito degli Angiolini, and it is ostensibly an “exhaustive overview” of Smith’s “more recent output, the result of an in-depth change in her expression and style” in the last twenty years. The exhibition is framed as a “splendid fairy tale” of nature in which the primary players are animals and where hierarchies have been abolished, but where, simul- taneously, a woman’s “revolutionary energy” is unleashed. Intriguingly, one of the curators has described the show as an invitation to refect on the “precious vulnerability” of the human condition in relation to the complexity of life. As curators Renata Pintus and Eike Schmidt note, in the 1990s Smith became known for her sculptural works depic- ting bodies, particularly female bodies. Indeed, Smith made her mark with abject feminist sculptural works such as Blood Pool (Art Institute of Chicago, 1992), a painted bronze sculp- ture of a young woman, or girl, curled up in the fetal position. A row of teeth protrudes from her spine, suggesting, perhaps, an oral fxation and a transgression of the boundary between inside and outside of the body that characterized early 1990s abject art. Although the curators remark that in these more recent works Smith “goes outside the body,” there are several human fgures, almost always nude, represented in What I Saw on the Road. Most are young and female, although there is one nude male subject as well. The exhibition includes approximately forty artworks, encompassing brightly coloured jacquard cotton tapestries, bronze, silver, and wood sculptures, and works on paper. The tapestries are the most compelling works in the show by far, in part because they take up the most space, but also because they recall Smith’s earlier engagement with bodies in order to unveil complex human experiences and fears. Three tapestries hang in a row in the frst room, so they inevitably read as a narrative. The frst tapestry, Fortune (2014), depicts a deer standing peacefully in a snowy lands- cape. The second, Earth (2012), represents a nude woman with wrinkles around her eyes, as well as laugh lines and/ or frown lines surrounding her lips. A tree below her feet mutates into a large snake, which slinks along the upper edge of the tapestry. Clearly we are meant to read this woman as Eve. In the next tapestry, Underground (2012), a naked man foats near the top of the piece; he is facing downwards, his curved back arching towards the tapestry’s upper edge. He is depicted against a threatening red background. The cura- tors would have us read Underground as a man’s encounter with nature that is “an opportunity for serenity and peace of mind.” This interpretation is undermined, however, by the threatening red glow. If anything, these three tapestries can be productively read through a lens of ecological disaster and climate change. But instead, the show is set up as though the law of Nature is one that is, and will continue to be, kind to humans, rather than leading to our inevitable demise because of our own hubris. It is also surprising to encounter so many naked pubes- cent girls in the exhibition. For example, in a tapestry entit- led Congregation (2014) a nude blonde girl is depicted seated on a tree branch, and branches are also growing out of her eyes. In my view, this is not a position of “revolutionary energy,” as the didactic panel suggests, but rather one of pre- carity. She is literally out on a limb. There is another naked girl near the end of the show, made out of fne silver (Girl, 2014). She has small breasts and a suggestion of pubic hair, and she hold feathers in her hands, but it is unclear whether this sculpture is meant to be read for signs of empowerment or objectifcation. To be fair, though, this is also the case for Smith’s important and ambiguous sculpture Lilith (1994), Kiki Smith What I Saw on the Road