Alain Kirili

Alain Kirili (29 August 1946 – 19 May 2021) was a French-American sculptor.

He was recognized for his post-minimalist abstract sculptures in forged iron and his large-scale public sculptures.

His work has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions in United States and Europe, and has received considerable critical interest from art historians, such as Thierry Dufrêne, Robert C. Morgan, Robert Rosenblum, and Kirk Varnedoe.

Kirili lived and worked in Paris and New York.

Alain Kirili was born in Paris.

At the age of 19, during the course of his early artistic training, Kirili discovered David Smith's sculptures Cubi XVIII and Cubi XIX, exhibited at the Musée Rodin in Paris and was immediately inspired by the American sculptor's work.

Kirili traveled to the United States that same year.

During his stay, Kirili visited the major museum collections in New York, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit, where he became interested in abstract expressionist painters.

Barnett Newman became an especially influential figure to him.

In 1966 Kirili met the Korean painter Ungno Lee (1904-1989) in Paris.

During this period, Kirili became part of the circle of intellectuals, writers.

and visual artists around Roland Barthes, the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva.

His first solo show was at Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1972.

Among other works, this show included a floor piece (Untitled, 1972; cut zinc sheet) which already contained many of the elements that would characterize his future practice.

This work is reproduced in the exhibition catalog, and accompanied with a text by the French poet and art critic Marcelin Pleynet.

Ileana Sonnabend introduced Kirili to Robert Rauschenberg, whom he credited with introducing him to important personalities in the New York art scene.

Kirili had several shows at Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and Geneva before his sculptures were first exhibited in New York in 1976 at the inaugural show of the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) and at the Clocktower Gallery in Lower Manhattan.

Messager, 1976, is one of Kirili's earliest forged iron pieces; it consists in a thinly shaped iron bar growing out of its base in modeled bronze.

The tactile and spiritual quality of the sculpture distinguishes it from then-prevailing tendencies in Conceptual art.

Art historian Robert Rosenblum perceived in this work a vertical force, familiar in the paintings of Barnett Newman, suggesting "a spiritually rather than materially assertive human presence".

The concept of verticality is indeed crucial in the context of Kirili's oeuvre.

In an interview with art critic Philippe Piguet, Kirili addressed the importance he ascribed to the concepts of circumvolution and incarnation.

One of his early sculptures was shown at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) in 1976.

Other early Kirili sculptures such as Indian Curve (1976) explore the upward movement of a curved metal bar seeking support on a wall, as well as the potentials of a horizontal rather than vertical extension (e.g. Longevity, 1980).

Kirili once described his aesthetic as "organic simplicity" in the tradition of, but formally not attached to, minimalism and abstract expressionism.

Indeed, his early sculptures are already concerned with tactility and gesture, emphasizing the active involvement of the artist's hand in the process of creation.

Kirili embraced a process that is immediate, combining emotions, intuitions, and the subconscious, in a free improvisation with the material.

The Commandement series of sculptures is one of Kirili's most important and ongoing bodies of work.

This series of distinct geometric forms, which art historians have described as "mystical fonts" and "abstract alphabets", rises 15 to 35 inches above the ground and individual examples are composed of up to 90 elements.

According to Kirili's statement, the title Commandement was inspired by a visit to the Jewish Museum in New York.

He came across the word "Rimonim" and was told that, in Hebrew, it referred to the pomegranate fruit and, by extension, to the Commandments in the Torah, which are said to be as numerous as the seeds in a pomegranate.

The forms of the elements in the Commandements series were influenced by his encounter, on New York City's Lower East Side, with the Torah calligraphers who trace their letters in the tradition of stone engravers.

This series is concerned with the symbolic value of basic forms, and particularly with the world of glyphs, signs, and texts, in a way that evokes not only Kirili's fascination with ancient scripture, but also his ties to the Parisian milieu of writers and intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva".

In 1977, his sculpture was included in the Documenta VI in Kassel, Germany.

That same year, he married the French photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici.

In 1978 while traveling in India for the first time, Kirili was inspired by the Hindu concept of Yoni / Lingam, a sculptural representation of the feminine (Yoni) and the masculine (Lingam) forming a symbolic union in the manner of base and sculpture in Kirili's work.

Kirili's first solo show in New York (1978) was held at Sonnabend Gallery where he exhibited a series of forged iron sculptures.

Others, e.g. Untitled (1978) and Laocoon II (1978), both representative of this first series in forged iron, are now in the Nasher collection, Dallas, and the Fonds National d'art contemporain (FNAC), France, respectively.

In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired one of his pieces (Indian Curve, 1976) for the first time, the acquisition coinciding with his move to New York.

In his article, Lingaistics published in Art in America in 1982, Kirili evoked more specifically the sexual and repetitive aspect of these abstract and highly symbolic religious objects.