Audacious and monumental

Picture a colossal woman, 25 meters long and 9 meters wide, figured three-dimensionally in rounded, simplified shapes and covered in bright, contrasting colors. She is lying on her back, legs spread apart. Her name is “Hon,” which means “She” in Swedish. To visit this lady, whose body houses videos, a bar, an aquarium and more, you enter… between her legs.

Tinguely, Pontus Hulten

Niki de Saint Phalle et Jean Tinguely

This audacious and monumental sculpture sprang from the imagination of Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). Her companion, sculptor Jean Tinguely, lent a hand in the construction of the work. The ephemeral piece existed only in 1966  for the duration of an exhibition in Stockholm organized by the visionary Pontus Hultén, then director of the Moderna Museet, before he moved on to head the newly founded Centre Pompidou in Paris from 1973 to 1981.

Hon, Niki de Saint Phalle

At Grand Palais

Niki de Saint Phalle

The spanking new Grand Palais in Paris hostes an exhibition organized by the same Centre Pompidou, dedicated to these three major figures of contemporary art and the works born from their collaboration, such as the famous “Hon.” Curator Sophie Duplaix addresses the subject, explaining, among other things, how monumentality from then on became a driving force of Niki’s artistic creation.

Jean Gabriel Mitterrand

Gallerist Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, who had known her since the late 1970s, recalls: “Niki used to say, ‘As a woman, I need to create very large things. But they are made of an infinity of elements, crafted slowly, like embroidery.’” Here she was referring to her magnum opus, a sculpture garden—“The Tarot Garden,” created between 1973 and 1993 in Tuscany, still open to visitors today.

Salon 94

Currently, Niki de Saint Phalle is the subject of heightened attention after years of relative quiet, in both the art world and on the market. The turning point seems to have been the major retrospective devoted to her at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2021. “That’s when we realized how complete her body of work is, from playgrounds to perfumes, architectural structures to books,” observes Fabienne Stephan from Salon 94 gallery, which represents her in New York.

Hauser&Wirth

Besides the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, powerful gallery Hauser & Wirth is presenting a joint show of Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle at its space in the Somerset countryside in England. The exhibition includes no fewer than 48 works by Niki, varying in size and date. They are for sale, from $8,000 for drawings up to $1.2 million for large-scale sculptures.

Galerie Mitterrand

Niki de Saint Phalle

Meanwhile, in Paris, the Mitterrand Gallery is presenting a significant group of her pieces, spanning from the 1960s to the end of her life, at their Marais and Faubourg Saint-Honoré locations, through July 17. Prices there range from €2,800 for small drawings up to €1.5 million.

Biopic

Also worth noting is the release last year in France of a biopic of her life,”Niki” directed by Céline Sallette. And on June 18, 2025, the restored version of her second feature-length film “A Dream Longer Than the Night” (1976)  landed in French cinemas. Among the recent wave of exhibitions dedicated to her are shows in Milan, Kansas City, Quebec City and soon Hanover.

Aix and Bourse de Commerce

Niki de Saint Phalle, Bourse de commerce

In Aix-en-Provence, through October 5, 2025, the Hôtel de Caumont is exploring her “magical bestiary,” a series seemingly descended from Surrealism and folk art, mingled with a certain mysticism and the artist’s own trauma. At Paris’s Bourse de Commerce, her “Black Nana” from 1965 is part of “Body and Soul,” an exhibition on the representation of bodies in contemporary art.

Bloum Cardenas, her granddaughter

“Niki resonates deeply with younger generations,” observes her granddaughter Bloum Cardenas, whom Niki entrusted with safeguarding her legacy. “She addresses important subjects like sexuality, abortion and gender fluidity—all with a certain sense of humor.”

A new matriarchal society

Niki de Saint Phalle

The beautiful Niki secured her place in our collective memory thanks to her Nanas, with their small heads and large breasts: archetypes of powerful, playful women. She once declared: “The power of the Nanas is really the only option. Communism and capitalism haven’t really succeeded. The time has come for a new matriarchal society.”

Undervalued

Niki de Saint Phalle

Edward Mitterrand, co-director of the Mitterrand Gallery, adds: “For this former model, the idea was not to reduce women to their mere beauty.” On the market front, he notes: “Compared to other artists of her generation, she is clearly still undervalued. Yet we regularly sell her works for around $1 million. Her market is steadily rising, without sudden spikes or speculative bubbles.”

Nanas

Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle developed her sculptural vocabulary in the 1960s, initially creating figures with wire armatures overlaid with papier-mâché, and later with resin. At the Mitterrand Gallery, one can find early works like a “Nana Fountain” from 1967 or “Dominique” (a Nana dedicated to Franco-American patron Dominique de Menil), as well as pieces from the 1990s which were made in editions of 100.

Visual appeal

However, their value depends less on age and more on size and visual appeal. Her auction record was set in 2015 when a “Black Nana” from 1968, measuring 2.2 meters high, sold for €994,000. Still, the auction market is lacking in recent, public high-water marks. This surely means that most sales are happening privately.

The problem of overproduction

Niki de Saint Phalle

The dip in Niki de Saint Phalle’s market at the end of the 20th century is largely attributed to the overproduction of works, mostly intended to autonomously finance her large “Tarot Garden” project. In a true Pop spirit—similar to Andy Warhol and even more to Christo (See here a report about Christo where he explains how he finances his work), who funded his massive global installations through drawing sales—Niki readily embraced diffusion. As early as the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was distributing pieces via the Prisunic retail chain.

Launching a perfume

From 1982 onward, she even launched a perfume, much like a luxury brand. As Anne Dressen and Nick Mauss elucidate in the MoMA PS1 exhibition catalogue: “Saint Phalle’s diffusion lines were misunderstood… She had invented her own system of production and value, qualifying these objects as series of ‘multiple originals.’ She (or an assistant) painted the surface of each multiple by hand, making it unique.

Niki de Saint Phalle

Even if these works were tools, created to finance her bigger, not-for-profit monuments and architectural structures, they weren’t conceived as secondary to her greater vision… Saint Phalle’s strategy resembled that of a businesswoman… Her diffusion lines brought her the fame she has today, but they also caused institutions to dismiss her.”

In hindsight, Edward Mitterrand observes: “The problem was mainly that the best works were invisible, while a mass of more average pieces populated the small dealers’ shop windows.”

Niki de Saint Phalle

Democratization

Recently, across Europe, her small colorful sculptures from the 1960s to the 1990s have sold at auction for between €10,000 and €30,000. This was after all what Niki de Saint Phalle wanted: a certain democratization of her work.