From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
For once, Facebook knew exactly where to send me. Maybe because I am a member of about a dozen online groups dedicated to textile arts – crochet, embroidery, elaborate mending, international knit-a-longs – the targeted ads informed me of the new Sheila Hicks show in North Rhine-Westphalia. This is the first solo exhibition dedicated to Hicks in Germany, with more than 250 works in two cities. The show at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop emphasises her early work in multiple media, including painting, as well as the influence of Josef Albers, with whom she studied at the Yale School of Art in the 1950s. The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf offers an overview of Hicks’s recent production, though because many of the pieces are variations on earlier models, this, too, has the feeling of a retrospective.
I went to the Kunsthalle with a friend who is a little older than I am but considerably younger in spirit. This is the ideal combination of qualities with which to approach Hicks. Standing in front of Torsade – Verdreht (2017), we played a game of ‘this reminds me of’. The work’s 19 vertical sticks are wrapped tightly in cotton and scraps of other textiles, then bound with orange, yellow, grey and purple threads. Chunks of bright orange and yellow fibre spread here and there like iodine stains. These uneven batons made us think of the legs of dancing mummies. A closer look revealed more textures: brightly coloured yarn, shiny green pleather, hints of a towel, the recycled arm of a sweater. Most amusing was a tag with the words ‘Columbia Sportswear Company’ – as though zombies had gobbled a hiker, or an Ivy Leaguer, along the way.
The artist’s wit is visible throughout. Buzz Buzz (2024) is a hanging bundle of sticks with ribbons of cloth, yarn, or hairlike floss affixed to them. I imagined them as dusters, or brooms for witches to ride on. Either option would be a neat nod to the revival of textile art in second-wave feminism, with its re-evaluation of traditional women’s work. ‘It looks like a giant cat toy,’ said my friend. We moved on to a triptych of three framed clouds of synthetic indigo fibres – Tache and two works both called Fibre Indigo (all 2016) – which stood Rorschach-ready for interpretation. The messy wisps recalled a man with a moustache, a dancer leaping up to the sky, the angry scribble that sometimes appears above Lucy in the Peanuts cartoons.
I was disturbed by the naughty thought that they also looked like pubic hair trying to fly away, at least until a few days later, when I watched a 2019 conversation between Sheila Hicks and Tyler Green at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Describing a childlike fascination with lines in the world, Hicks recalled the textural qualities of electrical lines, mops in the corner of a room, grandpa’s beard. From a child’s viewpoint, ‘if they start combing your hair […] they start to clean the brush after they combed your hair, and they leave it on the table before they throw it away, which is kind of sad,’ Hicks said with a laugh. ‘You start thinking about that. You start getting deeper and deeper into what becomes textiles.’
Installation view of the Sheila HIcks exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2024. Photo: Katja Illner; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024/the artist
Many of the works live at the meeting point of body and cloth. Saffron Sentinel (2017) fills the corner of the Kinosaal with large blobs of pigmented fibre held together by fine nets. The rough cushions range from white, canary and mustard yellows to bright red and maroon, and their arrangement suggests a mountain of fluffy thighs. Hicks has made a number of variations on this theme already. The Hepworth Wakefield displayed a version in shades of blue in 2022, while Alison Jacques had the multicoloured Infinite Potential in 2023. The warm tones of Saffron Sentinel give it a human quality, however, its matted texture resembling cellulite or chicken skin. Never have I felt such a powerful desire to throw my body into a work of art. Other visitors seemed equally mesmerised: they smiled, turned away, then were pulled back by the invisible call of an IKEA ball pit reincarnated as high art.
Hicks is known for her use of colour, and she and her team are skilled at capturing a boisterous mood, a weather event or a glimpse of sky. Sunrise in Machu Picchu (2020), with its vertical spans of linen thread in yellows, oranges, and slate blue, looks like someone took a painting of a lake, smudged it, and set it on its side. One of the ‘ponytail’ sculptures, Labyrinthe du Paradis (2024), with its pink, yellow, and olive-green gatherings of linen, is equally sunny and candylike. As I walked through the Kunsthalle, however, I saw another story developing in the white pieces.
Glyphes (2020) seems at first one of the simpler works on display. Other small, woven ‘minimes’ incorporate chunks of slate, petrified wood, sea shells and porcupine quills. But the charm of Glyphes lies in the differing widths of its weft and the varying luminosity of white linen, cotton and wool. Its name suggests a code, and it reminded me of the many moments in history when people without access to writing have used weaving and embroidery to record their secrets. As if I were freshly fallen snow (2016), woven loosely out of waxed linen, is even more elementary, but here the thicker weft in the middle gives the sense of packed snow in a fresh field, or the gauze bandage used after an accident. The showstopper is Au-delà (2022), a circle of cotton ropes falling from the ceiling, some plied into a neat coil, others lightly twisted. Where they hit the floor they look like an avalanche of silver-grey braided hair or the roots of an extravagant birch tree. Given all this, it might be easy to overlook Left (2024), described by the gallery label as made of ‘textiles found at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf’. A pile of beige and ivory-white gauze stacked loosely in a corner of the room, Left slyly alludes to the possibility that it might be swept up as trash. By contrast, the gallery’s experiential room was unimaginative: we found a table with plastic pompom frames and synthetic yarn, along with some printed instructions. We made our pompoms anyway, carefully placing one where it didn’t belong on our way out.
From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.