After an initial, much fêted presentation in the USA, Niki de Saint-Phalle’s exuberant figures bring their colourful rebellion to South America.
Brazil, the motherland of vibrant cultural celebrations and sensual female forms, is currently hosting a carnival of colour and provocation as 66 works from Nice’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) have arrived at Casa Fiat de Cultura in Belo Horizonte for the flamboyant Niki de Saint-Phalle, Rêves de liberté (Dreams of Freedom) exhibition. Through November 2, the Brazilian public is encountering an artist who turned assemblage into rebellion, paint into gunfire, and exuberant sculpture into a universal language of defiance and cheer.
At the heart of it all are Niki’s Nanas: voluptuous, larger-than-life female figures painted in bright colours, at once playful and political. Created in the hippie era, they embodied freedom, fertility and female strength, and soon conquered public squares and sculpture gardens across the globe. Their energy animates this Brazilian chapter, linking personal liberation to collective celebration.
But while the “girls” are the showstoppers, Casa Fiat also offers a retrospective of the artist’s itinerary from intimate beginnings to public monument. Early assemblages such as Scorpion and Stag (1956–58) and Assemblage Painting (c.1959) show Saint-Phalle testing form and material. Long Shot, Second Shooting Session(1961), part of her radical Tirs, captures the thrill and violence of paint released by gunfire. By 1965, the first Nana, Erica, emerges: a figure that would grow into an icon of feminism and joy, destined for plazas and sculpture gardens across continents.
“It’s my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy.“
— Niki de Saint-Phalle
For all its whimsy, Saint-Phalle’s art never strayed far from politics. The Trilogie des obélisques (1987), conceived amid the AIDS epidemic, acquires particular resonance in Brazil, which in 1996 became the first country to guarantee free universal access to antiretroviral therapy. This groundbreaking public health policy reflected values that resonate deeply with Saint-Phalle’s vision of art as a shared, healing force.
Loans from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo enrich the dialogue, placing European avant-garde traditions alongside Brazilian currents of public and socially engaged art. This artistic encounter highlights the artist’s radical insistence on community, female agency and playful participation, themes that echo in Brazil’s own histories of popular culture.Casa Fiat itself extends the conversation. Since opening in 2006, the institution has specialised in major international collaborations and free programming, making it a civic stage rather than a cloistered gallery. That ethos resonates with Saint-Phalle’s lifelong determination to bring art into streets, parks and everyday life.
None of this would have happened without Niki de Saint-Phalle’s extraordinary bond with Nice. In 2001, shortly before her death, she donated 190 works to the city, giving MAMAC one of the three major reference collections of her oeuvre. That gift now enables an ambitious hors-les-murs programme that keeps the museum present in the public sphere throughout its closure since January 2024 for a four-year renovation.
Mayor Christian Estrosi calls Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Brazilian chapter “an honour for Nice,” and a way of projecting the city’s cultural voice across continents. It is also a tribute to the Brazil-France Season 2025, celebrating 200 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Institutional shifts at MAMAC add their own layer to this story. After nine years as director, Hélène Guenin left in early 2025 to lead the Yves Klein Foundation; Johanne Lindskog now steers MAMAC as interim director while the collection tours.
After the first successful showing in Kansas City, Missouri in 2024, this is the collection’s second international stop while it awaits the MAMAC’s reopening in Nice in 2028.
Niki de Saint-Phalle insisted that art should be lived and shared. The work she donated to her chosen hometown of Nice has become a temporary emissary abroad. And that feels exactly like the life-affirming connection to the world that she so loved.
CONTACT DETAILS
Casa Fiat de Cultura
Praça da Liberdade,
10 – Funcionários
Belo Horizonte – MG
30140-010, Brazil
All images – Vue de l’exposition « Niki de Saint Phalle. Rêves de Liberté », 2 septembre – 2 novembre 2025, Casa Fiat de Cultura, Belo Horizonte, Brésil. Copyright Niki Charitable Art Foundation, Santee, Californie / ADAGP, Paris 2025. Crédit Photo Leo Lara.
Please share on your social channels