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Lianes Champagne, 2023 & Lianes de Beauvais, 2011-2012.

©Claire Dorn & Sheila Hicks, VEGAP, Málaga, 2023.

"What does my work consist of? I studied painting, sculpture, photography and drawing, but I was especially attracted to textiles. I practice a kind of textile art. I develop environments, make objects with threads, weave fabrics, make soft sculptures and bas-reliefs. I also design and produce utilitarian objects from yarn". This is how Sheila Hicks (born in 1934 in Nebraska and resident in Paris since 1964) summed up her work with hindsight.

Sheila Hicks is a great admirer of pre-Columbian weavings since she made a decisive trip to South America in the late 1950s. Beyond overcoming the historical model of the tapestry,  she has produced an unclassifiable but unmissable oeuvre. It is an oeuvre that moves fluidly between art, design and decoration, between the modernist legacy (she studied with Josef Albers at Yale) and non-Western traditions, between works of architectural dimensions and small textiles, the Minimes, made from 1956 onwards, with gestures that mix experimentation and reverie.

This monographic exhibition, the first devoted to Sheila Hicks in Spain, does not follow a chronological route. Instead, it seeks to encourage a sensitive experience of the work and a more direct immersion in the formal, material and chromatic universe of this artist. Textile is the material with which we live most in contact; cotton, silk, linen or wool clothing envelops our bodies on a daily basis. It is the same material with which Sheila Hicks sculpts, paints and colours space.