PRESENTATION:Sheila Hicks-A Little Bit Of A Lot Of Things

Sheila Hicks trained as a painter but she sees fibers and textiles as more than merely working materials, regarding them as both archaic and contemporary media linking interdisciplinary fields around the globe. Exploring and working in different cultures since the 1950s, she has been one of the most significant figures in contemporary art, whose multifaceted creations are characterized by an amazing sense of color and by intense engagement with architecture and photography.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunstmuseum St.Gallen Archive

Sheila Hicks’ exhibition “A Little Bit Of A Lot Of Things” is her first institutional solo in Switzerland. The American, who has lived in Paris since 1964, plays with natural materials in breathtaking colors. She keeps knotting, weaving or spinning new shapes from wool, linen or silk. On the one hand, the artist is influenced by modernism through her painting studies with Bauhaus master Josef Albers at Yale University. On the other hand, she is influenced by traditional handicrafts from different continents, which she got to know while traveling and during longer stays in Chile, Mexico, India and Morocco, among others. The exhibition “a little bit of a lot of things” contains works that cover a period of more than sixty years. It is a review of an extensive, fascinating work and at the same time an insight into the current artistic production of Sheila Hicks, whose creative power is unbroken to this day. Large-format works alternate with small weavings, which the artist repeatedly works on a hand frame “in between” as if it were a drawing pad. Sheila Hicks has repeatedly invented artistic manipulations in order to articulate new forms from textile materials, be it weaving interspersed with found objects from nature, scepters, which she wraps with colored wool, or arm-sized thread accumulations, which she ties and with which she creates huge forms cords. Two monumental, textile columns reach under the roof of the industrial building – which once housed locomotives – as if they were supporting the fragile roof structure. A heap of colorful woolen nets is piled up, forming a soft sculpture with painterly qualities. Hicks’ textile interventions fundamentally change the space. Dimensions are put into perspective, the artist intervenes on a scale that makes the human body a minor matter. In addition to the textile materials, which create a strong presence, Hicks’ color palette, which is saturated and extroverted, deserves a mention. It is reminiscent of the indigenous textile handicrafts of South America and India. Sheila Hicks thus mediates between different cultures and continents, but also between different traditions, such as painting and textile art, creating a unique artistic vision.

Sheila Hicks was born in the small town of Hastings, Nebada, in 1934,. Though her family moved around a lot during the Depression, Sheila Hicks and her brother returned each summer to Hastings, where their great-aunts instructed them in music, art and reading, as well as pioneer skills like spinning, sewing and weaving. She majored in art at Syracuse University, then transferred to the Yale School of Art where she studied with Josef Albersand with George Kubler, the influential historian of Latin American art. A picture of Peruvian mummy bundles, shown in Dr. Kubler’s class, sparked her interest in textiles, which was further galvanized when Albers took her home to meet his wife, Anni, the celebrated Bauhaus weaver. Hicks went to Chile on a Fulbright grant and traveled around Latin America, absorbing the influence of weavers in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. She received an M.F.A. from Yale, then returned to Mexico, where she photographed architecture and exhibited her “minims”. Some of her weavings entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She also married a Mexican-German beekeeper, moved to his ranch and gave birth to a daughter, Itaka. Having lived briefly in Paris in 1959, and finding that her life and marriage in rural Mexico conflicted with her artistic aspirations, she returned here with her daughter in 1964, supporting herself as a textile design consultant for Knoll Associates and through work for a German carpet manufacturer. Her second husband, a Chilean artist introduced her to surrealist and Latin American circles in Paris, and through a curator at the MoMA she received her first big public commission, for a wall hanging at the restaurant of Eero Saarinen’s new CBS building in New York. A defining moment in her career came with her invitation to exhibit at the Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne in 1967. In postwar Paris tapestry was promoted as a glory of French culture, but by the late ’60s the French organizers of this event were looking to shake things up. The monumental public commissions that have occupied her, intermittently, since the mid-’60s have often required complex studio setups and a phalanx of assistants: from her bas-relief medallion tapestries for the Ford Foundation headquarters in Manhattan (1966-67); to her wall hangings for a fleet of Air France 747s, stitched by hand in white silk (1969-77); to commissions for King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (1982-85) and a cultural center in Fuji City, Japan (1992-93); to an immense linen-and-cork knot, some 20 feet high by 60 feet wide, for the corporate offices of Target in Minneapolis (2002-3). At the same time her temporary, poetic installations of found fabrics, a cascading mountain of some five tons of clean Swiss hospital laundry, for example, which was her contribution to the Lausanne Biennial in 1977, or the floating curtains of baby bands (used to bind a newborn’s umbilical wound), which she showed in a gallery in Kyoto in 1978, explore the pervasive presence of cloth in every facet of human existence, from birth until death.

Photo: Sheila Hicks, Scarlet Bas-Relief, 2014, Photo: Andrea Rossetti, Courtesy Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland

Info: Curator: Gianni Jetzer, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen,  The LOK, Grünbergstrasse 7, St.Gallen, Switzerland, Duration: 4/2-14/5/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 13:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kunstmuseumsg.ch/