Kiki Smith’s “Untethered Journey” in Los Angeles: Thirty Years On, From the Body to the Stars

Thirty years is a long time to keep a city waiting. Kiki Smith’s “Untethered Journey,” at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles and jointly presented with Pace Gallery, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in LA in three decades. It opens on 30 October 2026 with a reception from 6 to 8pm and runs until 23 January 2027 — a rare chance on the West Coast to see how one of the most influential American artists of her generation moved from the interior of the body to the vastness of the cosmos.

Who is Kiki Smith?

Born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1954 and raised in the United States, Kiki Smith emerged in New York in the 1980s and quickly became known for work about embodiment — skin, organs, fluids, the vulnerable and the mortal. The daughter of the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, she took sculpture in almost the opposite direction: soft, intimate, wounded. Her work has appeared in five Venice Biennales, including 2017. Among many honours, she was named to the TIME 100 in 2006, received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2000), the Edward MacDowell Medal (2009) and the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts (2013), and became an Honorary Royal Academician in 2017. “Untethered Journey” is her sixteenth solo exhibition with Pace.

Inside Untethered Journey: the key works

The exhibition mixes historical and recent work, and the checklist reads like a survey of her most important moments:

• The 1989 “red room” installation and early bronzes of the body, from the period when Smith turned anatomy into sculpture.
• Blood Pool (1992) — a curled figure with an exposed spine, one of the defining images of 1990s body-focused art, made in years shaped by the AIDS crisis and debates over women’s bodies.
• Untitled (Skin) (1992) and Virgin Mary (1994), where religious iconography meets flayed, exposed flesh.
• Stars and Scat (1996), Moon on Crutches (2002) and Sybills (2005), marking her turn toward animals, the night sky and mythic female figures.

Materials range widely — bronze, papier-mâché, beeswax, polyester resin, fiberglass, glass, prints, textiles and large works on paper — and that range is itself part of the story. Smith has always treated humble, craft-based techniques as equal to heroic ones.

From the body to the universe

The title is apt. Commentators on the show describe an arc from early concerns with the body, sexuality and mortality to later work on nature, animals and the universe, and a tension between public and private. But it is less a departure than an expansion. As Smith herself has put it, “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body.” The stars in her later work are not an escape from the flesh; they are its continuation.

Why this show matters

For a younger generation of artists working with the body, craft and feminist mythologies, Smith is a direct ancestor, and seeing early and recent works together explains why. For collectors, a joint Deitch–Pace presentation of museum-calibre historical pieces is an important market signal of her continuing stature. And for Los Angeles audiences, the exhibition fills a genuine gap: an artist of this importance has not had a solo gallery show in the city since the mid-1990s.

The venue

Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles space at 925 North Orange Drive sits in the Hollywood gallery corridor around Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, close to several other major galleries — easy to combine into a longer afternoon of gallery visits.

Visiting information

Jeffrey Deitch, 925 North Orange Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90038. 30 October 2026 – 23 January 2027; opening reception Friday 30 October, 6–8pm. Opening hours were not confirmed by an official source at the time of writing, so please check with the gallery before visiting. See Pace’s official exhibition page, our Untethered Journey listing, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more openings.