Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON: UNTIL 14 JUNE

Donald Locke: Resistant Forms

CAMDEN ART CENTRE, LONDON: UNTIL 30 AUGUST

Robert Mapplethorpe, Phillip Prioleau, 1982 Silver Gelatin Print.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Maria Bartuszová

in ‘The Promises of the Past’, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Sheila Hicks has been working almost exclusively with textiles throughout her decades-long career. Known for pushing the material into monumental scale, Hicks’s textile sculptures and installations transform thread and fibre into entire environments and reflect her formalist training, with their emphasis on colour, form and line. Her work draws from traditions of weaving, architecture, fashion, and her personal experiences of living, working and travelling across the globe.

For her exhibition at the Nasher, Hicks has created new, site-specific installations in the Garden and Lower Level Gallery. Building on her recent monumental outdoor interventions in Paris, Versailles, and New York City’s The High Line, Hicks has activated the linear, man-made grid of the Nasher Garden by installing durable, colour-fast, pigmented fibre along the Garden’s architectural seams: walking paths, walls, and seating areas. Through this subtle, unmonumental gesture, Hicks suggests a latent material hovering beneath the Nasher Garden that is slowly seeping into the natural environment. In the Lower Level Gallery, the artist has installed new textile sculptures that complement the Garden intervention and invite viewers to consider the relationships between outside and inside, high art and craft, latency and activity, form and antiform.