Sheila Hicks: a little bit of a lot of things

Sheila Hicks’s inventiveness knows no bounds. The artist, who has lived in Paris since 1964, plays with natural materials in breathtaking colors. She continually knots, weaves, and spins new forms out of wool, linen, and silk. On the one hand, the artist was influenced by modernism, having studied painting under the Bauhaus master Josef Albers at Yale University. On the other hand, she is influenced by the traditional crafts of different continents, which she learned about while traveling and during extended stays in Chile, Mexico, India, and Morocco, among other places.

The exhibition a little bit of a lot of things includes works that span a period of more than fifty years. It looks back on an extensive, fascinating work and also features recent works by Hicks, whose creative power remains undiminished to this day. Large-scale works alternate with small weavings, which the artist continually works on from time to time, like drawings. Hicks has repeatedly invented artistic manipulations in order to articulate new forms out of textile materials, such as weaving interspersed with found objects from nature, scepters wrapped with colored wool, and accumulations of threads tied into ropes as thick as an arm.