ART-PRESENTATION: Sheila Hicks
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.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dallas Museum of Art Archive
Sheila Hicks at her solo exhibition “Secret Structures, Looming Presence” at Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) pairs a selection of her loom-woven, wrapped, twisted, and knotted fiberworks by the artist with works from the Museum’s Collection of ancient Andean art offerinf a fresh examination of textile traditions through time. As part of the exhibition, the DMA debuts the first work by Hicks to enter its collection, a richly textured panel titled “Zihzabal” that was purchased in April at the Dallas Art Fair through the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program. In this work wrapped bamboo sticks recall the important preservative and ritual acts of wrapping and bundling practiced by indigenous communities across the Americas, of which the Chancay Tree is an example. These and other references show how Hicks has experimented with ancient techniques to produce vibrantly original work. Also, the artist revealed that she intends to gift her monumental woven wall sculpture, “Chaine et trame interchangeable”, to the Museum. The work, originally commissioned in the 1980s to hang in the lobby of the One Main Place building in Downtown Dallas, has since been shown in nine countries and is currently on display in her solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Born in 24/7/1934 in Nebraska, Sheila Hicks studied painting at the Yale School of Arts and Architecture. There, she was strongly influenced by the teaching of textile artist Anni Albers, painter and color theorist Josef Albers, and art historian George Kubler, one of the greatest experts in Pre-Colombian and Ibero-American art, famous for his book “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things” (1973). Numerous trips to South America (Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, etc.) and five years spent in Mexico have fed her curiosity for pre-Colombian textile art; by meeting indigenous weavers and by visiting pre-Inca archeological sites, she discovered many techniques and materials. This is the starting point of a lifelong research on fibers, threads and fabric: Sheila Hicks observes materials, how they move, she dissects their language and creates her own, adding color, which is fundamental in her work. Her work consists mostly in bas-reliefs, tapestries and small and large-scale sculptures. Each one of her interventions, whether indoors or outdoors, involves a reflection and a dialogue with the physical and architectural context of the site. The sculpture and its environment communicate, so much so that she calls her installations “environmental sculptures”. During the second half of the 1960s, going beyond the tapestry model that had hit her to dominated textile work, she created “soft sculptures”, which have become iconic pieces. Piled up pieces of wool and linen that can be reinterpreted at every new showing, they reflected a line of thinking similar to that of contemporary Antiform and post-minimalist artists. In the following decade, she began a series of large soft sculptures made from vibrant lines of fiber, falling from the ceiling and filling the space with colour, they represented one of her major contributions to the art of the 1970s. Sheila Hicks works have also played a historic role in embodying a renewed meeting of haptic and optical perception. Through its malleable nature, textile gives life to works that are no longer bound by a fixed form. Deformable, stretchable and supple, it adapts and transforms, giving fresh vitality in diverse circumstances to every new location and installation. Thus, her installations adapt to their various environments as they play along with the laws of gravity.
Info: Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Duration: 30/6/19-12/1/2020, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.dma.org
