DALLAS, Texas (May 10, 2019)—The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space, an exhibition of new and recent work by the American-born, Paris-based artist, on view May 11 through August 18, 2019.
Sheila Hicks (American, born 1934) has been working with supple and pliable materials for over sixty years. Known for pushing perceptions of art beyond traditional associations, the artist uses fiber to create sculptures and objects that give material form to color.
“It’s an honor for us to be show the work of Sheila Hicks at the Nasher,” says Director Jeremy Strick. “We greatly anticipate the imaginative ways that her vibrant work will engage with the architecture of the museum, inviting our audiences to have an entirely new experience of the spaces both inside and outside the building.”
Hicks began to explore the vast range of tactile and tension structures, along with painting and color theory, under the guidance of the faculty assembled by Josef Albers at Yale University in the mid-1950s. There her interest in ancient weaving was piqued by Pre-Columbian art historian Dr. George Kubler, and Hicks began to intensify her research on color, form, texture, and structure. The artist spent several formative years at Yale (1954–59), interspersed with a study grant to Chile and travels through South America, where she visited, photographed, and documented archaeological sites and indigenous weaving that informed her earliest woven exercises. Hicks’s work has continually expanded in scale, from intimate weavings constructed wherever she treks, to the architectural breadth of expansive walls, wrapped columns, and dramatic, textured environments of intensely hued, bundled fiber. Seize, Weave Space engages Hicks’s myriad techniques of expanding her manual vocabulary, as visible in the installation that fills and transforms the Lower Level Gallery into a landscape of little-known discoveries.
The malleable nature of textiles ensures that Hicks’s works are not bound by a fixed form; rather, they are infinitely adaptable and encourage a sense of play. Their poetic nature is further emphasized by their titles. As Hicks explains, “Titles are a parallel path of entry. They are not descriptions. Metaphors reign. The implications are not too literal or illustrative.” At the threshold of the Nasher’s Lower Level Gallery, Sentinel of Saffron appears as a manifestation of its title—an implausible sentry. But any sense of foreboding implied by the title is immediately dispelled by the bright and monumental volumes of texture that inhabit the space. Nearby, a supple column of bleached linen yarn cascades from the ceiling, its title, Menhir, deriving from the French Breton term for a tall sacred stone erected in prehistoric times in western Europe. Again, Hicks’s sculpture subverts a descriptive reading. Rather than a rigid monolith, Menhir is a soft flowing form that pools onto the floor.
Hicks also commandeers innovative, industrially perfected fibers in her sculpture. Unique for their heightened colors of pure pigments that are resistant to both sun and humidity, synthetic fibers enable new creative exploits. This has greatly expanded the range of Hicks’s endeavors and also allows the artist to extend her installations outdoors where Seize, Weave Space continues in the Nasher Garden. Here, Hicks has draped the columns of the terrace with brightly colored coils of fiber which, like Menhir, gently gather on the ground. An additional sculptural intervention made of weather resistant fiber material, which has been knotted and coiled, occupies an adjacent portion of the garden.
About Sheila Hicks (born in 1934 in Hastings, USA; lives and works in Paris)
Stemming from the long tradition of modern art, which links abstraction to multiple disciplines, Sheila Hicks revisits traditional artisanal textile, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture with her woven and fiber-based work. After studying under Josef Albers at Yale, she started working with fibers during a journey in South America from 1958 to 1959, where she investigated the artisanal fabrics of Colombia, Chile, Peru and Bolivia; it then became her main medium. Hicks views her work, nourished by her travels and the cultures she has studied, as a process which results in the viewer interacting with the work she creates as well as the architecture it inhabits. Hicks has mounted recent exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; The High Line, New York; TextielMuseum, Tilburg, Netherlands; Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; and Hayward Gallery, London, among many others. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Cleveland Museum of Art; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others.
Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space is made possible through leading support by galerie frank elbaz. Major support is provided by Jay Franke and David Herro and The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, with additional support from Betty Regard / Marlene and John Sughrue / Dianne and Mark LaRoe / Jackie and Peter Stewart / Martha and Max Wells / Dr. Randall and Barbara Rosenblatt and Judy Glazer / Ann Glazer and Barkley Stuart / and Johnny Pardee and Matthew Brooker.
For high resolution images of the 2019 summer exhibitions, please follow this link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qjchs5v5wnixhmp/AAASDwyQ1oy1iBtAgotrP0f-a?dl=0
Press contact:
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Lucia Simek
Manager of Communications and International Programs
+1 214.242.5177
[email protected]
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About the Nasher Sculpture Center:
Located in the heart of the Dallas Arts District, the Nasher Sculpture Center is home to the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world, featuring more than 300 masterpieces by Calder, de Kooning, di Suvero, Giacometti, Gormley, Hepworth, Kelly, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, Serra, and Shapiro, among others.
The Nasher Sculpture Center is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm, and from 10 am to 5 pm on the first Saturday of each month. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, and free for children 12 and under and members, and includes access to special exhibitions.
For more information, visit www.NasherSculptureCenter.org.