DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Sheila Hicks is a grasp colorist, able to suggesting depth and motion in abstraction and seducing with determine and panorama all with out straying from formalist rigor. Certainly, an invigorating survey of principally latest works by the American artist at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is a feast of rhythmic kind and pulsating colour. Set towards the museum’s austere structure, Hicks’s wealthy array of regal blues and canary yellows is sensually offset by deep burgundies and creamy and ashy whites.
In “Amsterdam” (2014), a free-standing work, the volumetric physique and verticality of a cerulean blue cloth uncannily counsel a standing determine, adorned with braided grey yarn that cascades down as if luxuriant hair. But the work may additionally be Hicks’s tackle Amsterdam’s wintry colour palette, suggesting the movement of town’s quite a few canals constricted by frost. On this sense, whereas Hicks builds out the textile sculpturally, she additionally evokes panorama portray in three dimensions. Natural varieties extra broadly permeate the present, from the exuberant movement of the mop-like fringes in “Wishful Volcano” (2024); to the lumpy fibers in “Saffron Sentinel” (2017), imitating flowers; to the extra pared-down works wherein nature is diminished to rhythmic strains, akin to “Delphi” (2023) or “Sunrise in Machu Picchu” (2020).
Sheila Hicks standing subsequent to her work ”Aprentizaje de la Victoria” (2008–16), wool (picture by Katja Illner, courtesy the artist)
The survey’s scope — the most recent works are from 2024, and the earliest the mid-‘80s — engenders reflections on the trajectory of weaving as an art form. I thought, for instance, of Anni Albers, whose pioneering geometric weaves seem particularly relevant to Hicks’s work. Within the late Nineteen Twenties, when Albers studied on the Bauhaus, girls artists have been steered away from structure and portray towards crafts. By the Fifties, when Anni and Josef Albers have been educating at Yale College, the place Hicks was a pupil, weaving had been built-in into trendy artwork but nonetheless held an middleman standing as each artwork and craft. Hicks’s work appears to symbolize the following step in that evolution: freedom from any qualms about this intermediacy.
Her personal works vary from strictly geometric items, akin to “KH, 2024” and “HK, 2024” (each 2024), with their hard-edge crisscross patterns, to textile-objects, akin to “Target” (2023), a piece in each linen and cork. The uneven patterns of “Hommage aux Shakers” (2018) evoke older traditions, akin to Andean weaving, which Hicks realized about whereas touring in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador on a Fulbright scholarship within the late ’50s, in addition to the vagaries of the human (principally feminine) hand. Total, she is as more likely to depict strict geometry related to summary artwork as she is to reference artisanal strategies and traditions.
Within the course of, Hicks dismantles the residual hierarchy between excessive and low arts. What appears to curiosity her, as an alternative, is materials flexibility. Her artwork revolves round an oscillation between the style wherein textile and yarn will be laid out or hung to convey softness and movement, or bunched up for density and object-like sturdiness, or stretched to create an almost tectonic depth. She believes within the latent energy of supplies to problem and shock, emphasizing tactility in ways in which hyperlink her to Publish-Minimalist artists, akin to Eva Hesse. Liberated from most of the constraints earlier artists confronted, nevertheless, Hicks appears to be at liberty to align her work with a craft lineage, slightly than search a radical break with the previous.
Sheila Hicks,
”Labyrinthe du paradise” (2024)
(picture by Claire Dorn, courtesy Kunsthalle Düsseldorf)
Sheila Hicks, ”Embedded Enrobed Data of the Age” (2024), pure and artificial fibers (picture by Katja Illner, courtesy the artist)
Sheila Hicks continues at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Grabbeplaz 4, Düsseldorf, Germany) by February 23, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the establishment.