Sheila Hicks: A Matter of Scale

How to Play with Scale Published as a sequel of Apprentissages (2017), this new book by Sheila Hicks in the Hapax Series gathers together recent monumental and architectural-based projects by the acclaimed American Paris-based artist. It emphasizes her prolific but always sensitive relationship to the sites in which she intervenes, and her way of playing with scale, site-specificity, and context, and the constant rethinking of her numerous bodies of works. 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; Hop, Skip, Jump, and Fly. Escape from Gravity, High Line, New York, 2017-2018; and Proserpine en chrysalide, Versailles Gardens, Versailles, 2017-2018. There is a particular focus on Lifelines, Hicks' most recent retrospective hold at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Spring 2018) that the book documents thoroughly and considers as a case study for the artist's practice. Edited and introduced by Clément Dirié, the publication also features a conversation with Sheila Hicks and Jasmin Oezcebi-who codesigned the artist's installations in Venice and Paris-as well as historical documentation and texts that draw on Hicks' long-lasting thinking on the relationship between art and architecture. An American artist born in 1934, Sheila Hicks has dedicated her life to the textiles and fibers she handles, sculpts, and glorifies in works both big and small. Her unique style gives shape to an international language, understandable by each of us, which is simultaneously tactile, emotional, and straightforward. Thanks to her profound mastery of technical craftsmanship and her rare aesthetic intuition, her artistic practice finds its equilibrium at the intersection of applied arts and contemporary art, proposing an idiosyncratic chromatic and formal vocabulary.