Düsseldorf, Germany — Sheila Hicks is a master of color, able to suggest depth and movement in abstraction and to captivate with figures and landscapes, all without straying from formalist rigor sex. Indeed, the exhilarating survey of much of the American artist’s recent work at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is a feast of rhythmic forms and pulsating colors. In stark contrast to the museum’s austere architecture, Hicks’ rich royal blues and pale yellows complement deep burgundies, creams and off-whites.
In “Amsterdam” (2014), a free-standing work, the three-dimensionality and verticality of the sky-blue fabric surprisingly evoke a standing figure, adorned with gray braids that hang down like lush hair. However, the work could also be Hicks’s interpretation of Amsterdam’s winter tones, suggesting the city’s many canals shrinking due to frost. In this sense, Hicks evokes three-dimensional landscape paintings while sculpturally constructing textiles. Organic forms permeate more broadly throughout the exhibition, from the exuberant flow of mop-like edges in Ruyi Volcano (2024); to blocky fibers that mimic flowers in Saffron Sentinel (2017); to more streamlined works, where nature is reduced to rhythmic lines, as in Delphi (2023) or Machu Picchu Sunrise (2020).
The scope of the survey – the latest works are from 2024, the earliest from the mid-1980s – prompts reflection on the trajectory of weaving as an art form. For example, I think of Anni Albers, whose pioneering geometric weaves seem particularly relevant to Hicks’s work. In the late 1920s, while Albers was studying at the Bauhaus, female artists turned from architecture and painting to crafts. By the 1950s, when Anni Albers and Josef Albers taught at Yale, where Hicks was a student, weaving had integrated into modern art but remained a middle ground between arts and crafts. Hicks’s work seems to represent the next step in this evolution: the freedom from any doubts about this intermediary nature.
Her own work ranges from strictly geometric pieces, such as “KH, 2024” and “HK, 2024” (both 2024) with hard-edged cross patterns, to textiles, such as “Target” (2023), Can work with linen and cork. The uneven patterns of “Hommage aux Shakers” (2018) evoke ancient traditions such as Andean weaving, which Hicks learned about while traveling in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador on a Fulbright scholarship in the late 1950s. a little. The vagaries of the human (mostly female) hand. Overall, she may depict strict geometric shapes associated with abstract art, as well as referencing artisanal methods and traditions.
In the process, Hicks dismantled the remaining hierarchies between high and low art. Instead, she is interested in the flexibility of matter. Her art revolves around the way textiles and yarns are placed or hung to convey softness and fluidity, or gathered to achieve density and object-like solidity, or stretched to create an almost tectonic depth swing between. Her belief in the potential power of materials to challenge and surprise, with an emphasis on tactility, links her to post-minimalist artists such as Eva Hesse. However, freed from many of the constraints faced by earlier artists, Hicks seemed free to align her work with her craft lineage rather than seek a radical break with the past.
Sheila Hicks The exhibition runs at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Grabbeplaz 4, Düsseldorf, Germany) until February 23, 2025. The exhibition is organized by the agency.
