Travelling Threads arrive at the Pompidou in Malaga
Francisco Griñan, Sur in English
June 2023
As soon as you enter the gallery, a knotted fabric from Madagascar crosses your path as though it were a curtain. Your instinct tells you to walk round it rather than touch it since it has all the earmarks of being a work of art. The artist Sheila Hicks confessed that her objective was to unsettle the visitor. But with this first encounter the American artist has achieved her goal: to put the spectator on guard and have them make an effort to decipher what they see.
What they will see is a remarkable exhibition in which there are no paintings, even though some pieces look like canvases, there are no bronzes even though some are actually ‘sculpted’ and there are no installations, even though how they have been assembled is no different in some cases. […]