SHEILA HICKS: Thread, Trees, River

Opening                      Wednesday, December 9, 2020, 7PM
Exhibition Venue        MAK Exhibition Hall
                                    Mak, Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna
Exhibition Dates         December 9, 2020 – April 18, 2021
Opening Hours           Tue 10AM – 9PM, Wed – Sun 10AM – 9PM 

Dynamic, sensually enticing, infinitely colorful, delicately intimate, and often monumental and space-defining: the fabrics, sculptures, and installations of artist Sheila Hicks challenge traditional notions of art and explore new territories. Hicks is a virtuoso in textile vocabularies and their historical traditions, interweaving the fine arts with design, the applied arts, and architecture to create objects and environments in which materiality, tactility, form and color—ranging from the subtle to the vibrantly luminous—become a fascinating language of their own. In the MAK exhibition SHEILA HICKS: Thread, Trees, River, her first solo show in Austria, the artist presents both recent and familiar works with room-filling sculptures, relating them to the architecture. 

In the monographic exhibition SHEILA HICKS: Thread, Trees, River, the artist presents four thematic sceneries that highlight different aspects of her wide-ranginig oeuvre. A series of monumental Prayer Rugs (1970–1974) created in Morocco, interacts with the Tor zum Garten [Door to the Garden] (1990) by Walter Pichler (1936–2012), symbolizing the transition between inner and outer space. Her works, executed in a variety of knotting and weaving techniques, explore the theme of cultural appropriation. The bas-relief panels or rugs—embedded in a secular context—hung on the walls, inspire and direct the occidental gaze to hidden perspectives. The uplifting arched forms symbolize the ambivalence of ties whose tension is created by the simplest of means, juxtaposing the closing and drawing of borders, an ideal of all-encompassing openness.