Kiki Fleming

Kiki Fleming was born in Guangzhou, China in 1942 of Danish/English parents. After the war Kiki Fleming moved with her parents to Hong Kong where she spent most of her life. Parallel to her work as an artist, Kiki Fleming also worked as a choreographer and event designer for the most prestigious names in the fashion industry such as Hermès, Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Gucci, Fendi and many others. Her real love, however, was for painting and in 1995 she left Hong Kong to live in Italy to pursue her passion. Since the year 2000 she has exhibited in Museums and galleries in Italy, New York France and Germany.
Kiki Fleming is a skilled cosmopolitan painter who clearly displays an ability to interpret subtle expression of thought, to stimulate the imagination and to spur new emotions.
Her refined compositions are formed with simple color fields which often resemble the merging of mists and clouds in the heavens while her more pristine rectangular shapes and lines define, what she calls, her changing horizons.
The glowing reds, whites and oranges of her brighter paintings contrast with the sombre colors used in her darker works. These delve into the innermost recesses of the human mind where unconscious voids and distant memories are amalgamated with collective legacies and layers of subjective emotionality.
Through the lyrical tension in her paintings and the power of her colors and tonal reverberations she is able to touch and stir the deeper psychological chords of the soul.
The combination of letters and brush strokes, that sometimes appear in Kiki Fleming’s paintings, have an intriguing mechanism that urges the viewer to try and unravel the mysterious language, decode the message or read the poem. Whatever their meaning, the words and letters seem to burst onto the canvas with speed and decision as does graffiti on a forbidden wall. Yet on some works the flowing letters are faint and hardly visible as through they are trying to hide an ancient secret or to record a fading memory.
Her works abound with controlled energy while exploring the eternal quest of “chiaro scuro” both in art and in life. With great intelligence and sensitivity, she creates a spatiality that is both varied and linear, almost schematic, that leads ultimately to the creation of her own poetic universe.
Kiki Fleming lives in the mountains of Umbria where the sky’s resplendent transitional hours of dusk to dawn are a constant source of inspiration. Profoundly touched by these naturalistic wonders, she transfers her impressions on the canvas not in a direct and realistic illustration of the vistas that inspire her, but instead, allows the impact of the scene to filter through her mind. She states that “whatever happens on the canvas is not a direct reflection of reality but an emotive expression of captured time and inner space.”
Kiki Fleming has showcased her artwork in exhibitions all over the world, including Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Rome. Art and Space Gallery is proud to show her work for the first time in Munich.

Exhibitions: