Paris 1952, Niki moved to France with her husband and daughter, far from a suffocating America and family. But despite the distance, Niki is regularly shaken by reminiscences of her childhood which invade her thoughts. From the hell that she will discover, Niki will find in art a weapon to free herself.
An early ecofeminist, Niki de Saint Phalle built a committed and feminist body of work by placing her life and ideas in her art. The artist was born on October 29, 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a year after her family left the United States. She worked as a model for Vogue, Life Magazine and Elle before marrying the writer Harry Mathews with whom she had two children. Traumatized by an abusive father during her youth, she suffered a nervous breakdown. It was in a psychiatric hospital in Nice that she began to paint. In 1956, she met Jean Tinguely in Paris who became her husband. The latter creates machines that question know-how as well as the artist’s relationship to technique. He introduces her to Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, César, Arman and the other members of the New Realists group that she joins. Niki de Saint Phalle then decided to use art as therapy but also to defend the cause of women and begin to raise awareness about the consequences of man’s activities on nature well before the ecological problem was a subject. Niki de Saint Phalle is known for her series of Shots (set of performance paintings in which she inserts various objects into plaster and slides bags of colored paints which she pierces by firing bullets) as well as her sculptures Pineapple in resin and glued papers.
It was surprising that the cinema had not yet dedicated a film to Niki de Saint Phalle. It is now done with NikiCéline Salette’s first feature film. Best known for her film roles, the neo-director debuted in 2006 in Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola. She then filmed with great French directors like Bertrand Bonello in L’Appolonides: Memory of the brothel (for which she was nominated in the best female hopeful category in 2012), Jacques Audiard in Of rust and bone (2012), Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine in Saint-Amour (2016), or André Téchiné in Our Roaring Twenties (2017). In Nikiit is Charlotte the Good who lends her features to the artist while John Robinson plays the role of Harry Mathew and Damien Bonnard that of Jean Tinguely.
