Kirjahaku

“I found my voice and my footing in my small work. It enabled me to build bridges between art, design, architecture, decorative arts, crafts.”—Sheila Hicks “Chunky and chalky, with a blind-embossed textile cover and the shaggiest deckle edges you have ever seen, Weaving as Metaphor turns heroic graphic design into an act of impersonation.”—Alexandra Lange, Curbed First published in 2006, this book examines the small woven textile works produced by artist Sheila Hicks (b. 1934) over a fifty-year period. Focusing on some one hundred miniature tapestries from public and private collections, the book demonstrates the breadth of Hicks's concerns: her playful subversions of weaving traditions, her persistent inquiry into the mysteries of color, her surprising range of materials, and her exploration of new technology. The volume, designed by Irma Boom and named “the most beautiful book in the world” at the 2007 Leipzig Book Fair, includes essays by Arthur C. Danto, Joan Simon, and Nina Stritzler-Levine as well as illustrations of the artist’s working tools, related drawings, photographs, and chronology.

Published as a sequel to Sheila Hicks: Apprentissages (2017), this new book by the artist (born 1934) gathers recent monumental and architectural-based projects. It emphasizes Hicks' relationship to the sites in which she intervenes and her way of playing with scale and site-specificity. Among the outdoor and indoor projects featured in the publication are Foray into Chromatic Zones (Hayward Gallery, London, 2015); Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017); and Hop, Skip, Jump, and Fly. Escape from Gravity (High Line, New York, 2017-18). Sheila Hicks: A Matter of Scale places a particular focus on Lifelines, Hicks' recent retrospective held at the Centre Pompidou, which is treated here as a case study for the artist's broader practice.

A unique book embracing the verticality of Sheila Hicks’ work For decades, Sheila Hicks has engaged with color, texture and verticality, using textiles as her medium of choice. Her unique approach is informed by her interest in architecture, space, historical weaving traditions and innovations in fiber technology. This new bilingual publication (English and French) focuses on her cascading multicolored columns. Building on her earlier work and occupation with verticality, the columns have extended to new and spectacular settings, notably outdoors, refusing any traditional limitations, adapting to various environments, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales to the rocky hills of the French countryside and medieval castles. Hicks’ work has always been published in innovative formats, a result of her creative collaborations with designers. The book reflects the verticality that is crucial to Hicks’ towering fiber structures. It features stunning reproductions of the columns created by the artist over the last 10 years. The selection culminates in Hicks’ most recent installation, Vers des horizons inconnus in front of the Institut de France during Paris + in 2023. Radical Vertical Inquiries is an eye-popping, design-forward companion to Hicks’ work that shines on its own. Sheila Hicks was born in Nebraska in 1934 and has lived and worked in Paris since 1964. Her engagement with different cultures enables her to create and exhibit artworks, ranging from the miniature to the monumental, that have been exhibited at museums and other institutions around the world. Among her numerous awards are: U.S. State Department Medal of Arts (2023); Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, France (2022); Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Yale University (2019).

A pioneer of textile postmodernismSheila Hicks has made wool, linen, and silk her central media, pushing the boundaries of traditional textile art. Her works combine color, form, and material in novel ways and explore architectural dimensions. As a pioneer of textile conceptual art, Hicks has developed a distinctive visual language over six decades, from finely woven miniatures to monumental installations that open up new perspectives on the possibilities of art. This book contains views of Sheila Hicks's exhibition a little bit of a lot of things at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen as well as a conversation with the curator Rob Storr and an essay by Gianni Jetzer. It also documents a master class held by the artist in St. Gallen and contains previously unpublished images.