Every summer, the Atlanta Botanical Garden features one particular artist with installations around the property, and it’s always interesting to see the art in the context of the garden environment. This year, the featured artist is Niki de Saint Phalle. Her works on display are full of energy, movement, whimsy, and joy. 

The Niki Charitable Art Foundation has this to say:

Born Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle in 1930, she was known to family simply as “Niki.” She was, by every measure, a rebel. Raised in an upper-class French-American family with rigid expectations, she eloped at 18 with her childhood friend to escape their control.

In 1953, she suffered a nervous breakdown, and it was during her hospitalization that friends encouraged her to try painting as a path toward healing. That small act of creative recovery changed everything. Though she had once dreamed of acting, Saint Phalle chose art – and art, in turn, chose her. With no formal training, she forged her own path, associating freely with the era’s most experimental artists, writers and composers.

Her art was never quiet. She used bold color, raw emotion and fearless scale to push back against a minimalist art world that had little room for joy, or for women.

She became best known for her “Nanas” – voluptuous, exuberant figures of women rendered in fiberglass, resin, mosaic glass and mirror that seemed to dance rather than stand still. Animals, mythical creatures, totems and sports heroes populated her world as well. One of her greatest life’s works, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, is a sculptural landscape inspired by tarot cards – a surreal, walk-through universe she spent decades building.

Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, believed that connecting with the natural world was essential to the human spirit, and she created sculpture gardens and outdoor exhibitions across the world to prove it. But here, among the blooms and canopy of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, her work lives on, as joyful as ever.

I was really looking forward to seeing this summer’s installation, and it did not disappoint. I found myself inspecting one sculpture and then spying another across the way and rushing over to it to inspect that one. I originally thought that I would just post a few photos of some representative works of art, but you know what? No. I decided to post every photograph, and I’m pretty sure that I took a picture of every piece of Niki’s art that was on display. Each work of art gave me a sense of wonder and, indeed, a sense of joy.

“I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals. And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy.”

-Niki de Saint Phalle, 1968