Sheila Hicks

(American, born 1934)

Piedras suaves
circa 2006

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, USA (a gift from the artist)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited
Santiago, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Sheila Hicks | Reencuentro, 2019, p. 163, Fig. 3, illustrated in colour




Sheila Hicks was born in Hastings, Nebraska and studied under Josef Albers at Yale School of Art. Anni Albers' work with fibres and Josef's approach to colour would influence her work profoundly and over time she would slowly move away from painting and towards textile art. Hicks has travelled extensively throughout her life, spending time in Chile and living in Mexico for several years before settling in Paris in 1964. In 2018, the French newspaper Le Figaro called her the artist that everyone is fighting over as part of an issue that listed the 20 most important cultural figures in Paris. Few artists have managed to propel the age-old medium of textile into the realm of fine art quite as well as she has.

Hicks' innovative, thread-based oeuvre ranges from small Minimes, framed weavings made like diary entries on a portable loom, to larger than life installations such as Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (2016–2017), which Hicks debuted at the 2017 Venice Biennale. As well as classical forms of textiles such as wool, silk and cotton, her practice incorporates innovative new inventions including pure pigmented acrylic and found materials like wood and metal. A beautiful and rich symbiosis of colour and texture, Hicks' work is imbued with stories, memory, and culture. A shell, found on a distant beach is woven into the fabric of a Minime made that day and is thereby remembered; a deceased loved one's belongings, donated to Hicks' studio, live on embedded in one of her boules or comets. They become part of something lasting, something transcending life and death.

Hicks' work is featured in the permanent collections of the most prominent institutions in the world, such as the Tate Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the Museum of Modern Art, New York amongst many others. In 2000, she was recruited by UNESCO to found Madesa (Manufacturing and Design Academy of South Africa), whose mission was to teach women practical and artistic skills in various artistic and entrepreneurial practices.
Hicks' work will be the subject of a major exhibition at MAK, Vienna in November 2020 and at Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire in 2021. Last year, the artist was celebrated in three major solo exhibitions: Campo Abierto (Open Field), The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and Reencuentro, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Santiago where the present work was exhibited.