There's great comfort in exhibitions about textiles: their dynamic colours can indeed be inspiring and inject some optimism even in the darkest times, while their tactile quality transmits an immediate sense of comfort.
Delicate or monumental, Sheila Hicks' installations are a joy to the senses. They combine indeed fine arts with design and architecture creating unique vibrantly luminous environments transformed by the possibilities of materiality, tactility, form and colour.
The artist is going to be celebrated with a new exhibition, opening to the public tomorrow at MAK- Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria - "Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River" - that features both new and previous works.
Born in Nebraska (1934), Hicks studied at Yale University, training as a painter under former Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers and she learnt auto didactically weaving techniques from artist Anni Albers, archeologist Junius Bird and art historian George Kubler who introduced her to Pre-Colombian weaving in 1956.
Inspired by Modernism, Hicks started exploring issues of cultural appropriation and analysing pre-Inca textiles after reading Raoul d'Harcourt's book Les textiles anciens du Pérou et leurs techniques (Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques, 1934).
Thanks to a Fulbright scholarship in the late '50s she travelled to Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile. In Mexico she met artist Mathias Goeritz and architects Luis Barragán, Ricardo Legoretta and Félix Candela.
While in South America, Hicks developed an interest in textiles that took her all over the world, from Mexico and South Africa to Morocco and India, where she often met and worked with local artisans, artists and fabricators. Her first major solo exhibition was held in 1974 in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.
Her colourful installations are admired all over the world and she continues to create both large-scale textile projects and enchanting miniatures. All her pieces are characterised by a strong sense of colour and by an intense engagement with architecture and photography.
"Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River" explores different themes and techniques characterising Hicks' practice. Hicks' three-dimensional bas relief-like Monumental Prayer Rugs (1970 - 1974) created in Morocco, are showcased in dialogue with the Tor zum Garten (Door to the Garden, 1990) by Austrian architect Walter Pichler, creating a transition between inner and outer spaces, while inviting visitors to consider the knotting and weaving techniques employed to make the pieces.
The site specific installation "La Sentinelle de Safran" (2018) is the heart of the exhibition: it is made with giant and soft bundles of pure pigmented fibers. The soft fiber bales are similar to the ones that three years ago formed "Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands" at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice, but in this case they come in an energetic palette of warm colours from red and orange to bright and pale yellow.
Yellow also characterises "Apprentissages de la Victoire", a voluminous mass of coloured cords of coconut fiber covered in hand-spun wool. The piece forms a textile cascade on one of the walls of the MAK Exhibition Hall, flowing beautifully into a sculpture symbolising the power and strength of nature.
The title of the exhibition - "Thread, Trees, River" - is also a celebration of nature, evoked by the position of the museum, located next to the City Park and Vienna River. Hicks often integrated fragments of nature such as shells, slate, corn husks and twigs into her works from the 1960s onwards.
But while such works invite visitors to analyse them carefully to spot the various elements incorporated inside them, others like "Lianes Ivoires" or "Racines de la Culture", should be enjoyed for their complex colour scheme and the dynamic shapes they create or for the way their colour codes attempt to create patterns of speech (see the woven tapestry "Color Alphabet", 1988).
Hicks is very much interested in a language of textiles and fibers and, to this end, she creates a dialogue between weaving and writing, traditions and cultures: the exhibition includes for example abstract woven pieces (700–800 AD) from Nazca in Peru, a civilization known for its impressive system of underground aqueducts. Starting from textile fragments with symbolic, geometric patterns, the artist draws a line from pre-Columbian culture conceived as the root to the present and the future.
Hicks' "Minimes", smaller woven pieces and constructions of threads are juxtaposed to large-scale works. Woven from cotton, silk, linen and other natural threads, they are studies or sketches, mini bold experiments that complete Hicks' textile vocabulary, revealing the artist's endless passion for painting, fibers and colours even in miniature format.
Image credits for this post
Sheila Hicks, Constellation, 2020
Photo: Cristobal Zanartu
© VG Bild-Kunst
Sheila Hicks, Constellation, 2020
Photo: Cristobal Zanartu
© VG Bild-Kunst
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
Monumental, 2018–2020
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
La Sentinelle de Safran, 2018
© MAK/Georg Mayer
Sheila Hicks, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2017
Installation view, Arsenale, Venice Biennale
Photo: Cristobal Zanartu
© VG Bild-Kunst
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
Apprentissages de la Victoire, 2008–2016
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
Racines de la Culture, 2018
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
MAK Exhibition Hall
La Caze, 2017
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
Menhir, 1998-2004
MAK Exhibition Hall
© MAK/Georg Mayer
MAK Exhibition View, 2020
Sheila Hicks: Thread, Trees, River
Perruque Aubergine, 1984/85
MAK Exhibition Hall
© MAK/Georg Mayer
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