Sheila Hicks. Thread Trees River

Moving, sensual and inviting, endlessly colorful, at once tender and intimate, then again monumental and extensive: the textiles, sculptures, and installations of the American artist Sheila Hicks, who has been living in Paris since the 1960s, challenge traditional concepts of textile art and explore new layers in the diametric fields of fine and applied art.

Having started her artistic work as a painter, Sheila Hicks regards textiles – far beyond the raw material – as an archaic and contemporary medium that connects interdisciplinary fields across the globe. The artist has been working and carrying out research within different cultural fields since the 1950s. During her sojourns in North and Latin America, Europe, the Near East, and Asia, she adopted an extraordinarily rich knowledge of indigenous weaving practices, which became an intrinsic element of her multifaceted work.

Sheila Hicks studied at Yale University under Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Anni Albers (1899–1994), among others. Inspired by the concepts of the Bauhaus and the Wiener Werkstätte, she defies the boundaries of medium and material and uses the historic techniques of knotting and weaving as a vehicle to initiate intercultural dialogue and awareness for the minute variations in  (traditional) patterns that essentially make life interesting.

Alongside her distinct feel for color, an intense engagement with architecture and photography – as well as with nature as the starting point for her textiles – play a key role in her work. The Leporello book object with its vivid yellow linen binding reveals on the front side visual impressions of Sheila Hicks’s work in photographs of the exhibition and her objects. On the reverse, essays by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein and Bärbel Vischer, as well as an interview with the artist by Itai Margula, situate Sheila Hicks’s work in an art historical and biographical context.

This publication acompanies the exhibition Sheila Hicks. Thread, Trees and River, open for visitation until 18, Apr at the MAK - Museum of Applied Art, Vienna.
>> For more information on the exhibition click here.


About the artist
Sheila Hicks studied at Yale University under Josef Albers (1888–1976), various weaving techniques were taught to her personally by the textile artist Anni Albers (1899–1994). Through Josef and Anni Albers, she immersed herself in the ideas of Bauhaus and Modernism. In addition, she has been inspired by Raoul d’Harcourt’s book Les textiles anciens du Pérou et leurs techniques [Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques] (1934) to explore the subject of cultural appropriation and to turn from painting to textile as a medium.
At the end of the 1950s, a Fulbright grant enabled her to spend time in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. In Mexico, she developed a close connection to the architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988). To this day, Hicks sees the textile as an intrinsic element of architecture and a metaphor for measuring space - comparable to the practice-oriented approach of architect and theoretician Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), who explored the context between nature, textile, architecture, and space.