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Sheila Hicks in front of Nowhere to Go, 2022 installed at The Hepworth Wakefield Photo: Joanne Crawford; Courtesy: The Hepworth Wakefield; © The Hepworth Wakefield

Sheila Hicks

born 1934 in Nebraska, USA

lives and works in Paris

Walking backwardsUp the hillWith long vistasExpansive horizonsNight fallingCautious steps

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Sheila Hicks began as a painter, but soon broadened the scope of her artistic output using soft materials and drawing inspiration from ancestral art, particularly pre-Columbian. Her wrapped, woven, embroidered, knotted and twisted works are made of fibres both natural and man-made and systematically transcend strictly pictorial or sculptural genres as they assimilate the open space.

The artist deploys all manner of resources in her experiments. It is her belief that each material speaks its own language, defined by properties such as color, thickness, and haptic quality. By merging, within the same work, highly disparate and even unexpected color tones, textures and materials, she initiates a conversation in which each voice has its own place, a conversation in which we, too, are invited to take part. Indeed, she invokes our most elementary visual and tactile experiences, those we acquire in the very first years of our existence. Based essentially on the physical and the sensory, this primitive experience constitutes a resource inherent in humanity, and therefore universal, even if it is most often buried, not to say repressed, by society. Both steeped in this pre-conscious inner world (founded on ancient reminiscences) and deeply inspired by nature, which is ubiquitous within her oeuvre, Sheila Hicks’s works allow a multitude of infinitely poetic associations.

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Julia Garimorth

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Selected solo exhibitions: Musee Industriel de la Corderie Vallois, Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville (2022); The Hepworth Wakefield (2022); MAK – Museum for applied arts, Vienna (2020); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019); Dallas Museum of Art (2019); The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Magasin III Jaffa, Tel Aviv (2018); Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (2011); The Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM), Prague (2011); Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach (1999); Textile Museet, Boras (1994); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1974); Art Institute of Chicago (1963).

Selected museum collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cleveland Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Among the honors she has received are the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award des International Sculpture Center (2022), den Ehrendoktortitel der Yale University (2019) und der École des Beaux-Arts Paris (2014), den Lifetime Achievement Award des Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art (2010) sowie die Titel Officier des Arts et des Lettres (1993) und Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1987) des Ministère de la Culture Paris.