Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams

This summer, The Courtauld Gallery presents sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams—three artists who, in 1960s New York, develop new work that challenges conventions of modern sculpture.

The exhibition focuses on their shared use of humour and abstract form to explore questions about sexuality and the body. Critic and curator Lucy Lippard describes this kind of work as “abstract erotic”. In 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams are the only women artists included in Lippard’s exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction”. Before the women’s movement, they engage with a feminist politics of the body through abstract, playful forms in materials such as latex, expanding foam, string, and plaster. Lippard later writes, “I can see now that I was looking for ‘feminist art’.”

This is the first time The Courtauld stages a group exhibition of this scale, with abstract sculpture presented throughout the gallery in unconventional ways. “Abstract Erotic” includes key loans from public and private collections in Europe and America, many rarely shown due to their fragility.

Alongside Bourgeois and Hesse, the exhibition features Alice Adams, whose sculptural work from the 1960s appears for the first time in the UK and in its most extensive museum context to date.

The exhibition draws on the research and teaching of Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art, particularly her 2012 book “Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America”. Applin, Director of the Centre of the Art of the Americas at The Courtauld Institute of Art, co-curates the exhibition with Dr Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Courtauld Gallery.