Centre Pompidou

Lignes de vie

Lignes De Vie

07 Feb - 30 Apr 2018

Sheila Hicks, Bielefeld (2013)
© Philippe Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP
© Adagp, Paris
LIGNES DE VIE
Lignes De Vie
7 February – 30 April 2018

Since the late 1950s, Sheila Hicks has been producing work exceptionally difficult to categorise. Knotting, wrapping, folding, twisting and stacking wool, linen and cotton: these are only some of the techniques and materials that have seen her undermine conventional artistic categories and their hierarchical relationships. A pupil of Josef Albers at Yale, Sheila Hicks is the heir to both a Modernist spirit that holds the distinctions between fine art, decoration and design to be unimportant and a textile practice that has its roots in pre-Columbian America.

If Sheila Hicks chose textiles, it is because from clothes to furniture, interior decoration and on to the canvas that undergirds the high art of painting, these are materials that life constantly puts in our way, in a vast variety of contexts. It also allows works to remain alive, taking different forms each time they are shown. Ductile and tactile, Hicks’s work occupies a singular place in the art of our time. It combines forms typical of modernism with non-Western traditions, the play of colour, and a concern to maintain the vital openness of the work. The Lignes de vie (Life Lines) exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together pieces representative of her whole career: a vast, vibrant and vital installation, pulsing with form and colour, and open onto the city thanks to the gallery’s full-length glazing giving onto street level outside.
 

Tags: Josef Albers, Sheila Hicks