'The works of all three artists sit close to the walls, hang from the walls, dangle on wires in front of them, or sit on shelves in a vitrine, jostling in and out of view, emphasising intimacy and proximity. It is a show of close relations, filled with delicate things and enigmatic things, and things as incomprehemsible as they are beguililng. It isn't about all forms directly analogous to body parts, although there are plenty of those. There is instead an unnerving slippage between the skin and the interior, between the whole and the part, just as there is between sculptural form and drawing, between object and image, threat and tenderness, familiarity and otherness.
... Gender in almost all the works here is slippery, when it can be ascribed at all'.
(Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 19th of June, 2025).
Absstract Erotic at the Courtauld.
The term 'abstract erotic' was coined by the American critic and feminist curator Lucy Lippard to describe a new kind of sculpture emerging from artists 'studios in New York in the 1960s. This work was distinctive in its sensual approach to abstraction, evoking the body through organic forms and the use of surprising, often tactile and flexible materials. Lippard recalled: 'The work I was looking for was abstract and formally simple, with rough edges and erotic undertones'.
In 1966 Lippard curated a ground-breaking exhibition called Eccentric Abstration, which
embodied this new approach to sculpture, distinct from the rigorously geometric forms of abstraction prevalent in the art of the time. Lippard highlighted the unexpected materials on display, which, she said, produced a 'sensuous response' in the viewer 'even if they are not supposed to be touched'. The materials ranged from the handmade to the industrial, from simple paper mache, cord and wire to latex, plastic mesh, netting and chain-link fencing. Even the exhibition flyer, which she had specially produced on sheets of pinkish-brown vinyl, paid homage to the show's eccentric, erotic themes. Despite its small scale, Eccentric Abstraction went to to profoundly shape the language and legacy of post-war American sculpture.
This exhibition brings together the three women artists in Eccentric Abstraction: Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Although they did not form a close-knit group, they knew each other through a shared friendship with Lippard, who published some of the earliest writing on their work. Lippard recognised something bold, humorous and erotic in their sculptures' use of unusual materials. Her inclusion of them in Eccentric Abstraction was an impressive curatorial feat during these years when women artists were not regularly shown in galleries or well known. Later reflecting on this, she would say: 'I can see now that I was looking for feminist art'.
All three artists experimented with materials in new and exciting ways, producing sculpture whose 'controlled voluptuousness' had 'a sensuous, offbeat abstraction', in the words of Lippard. Their sculpture deployed the monochrome palette of the minimalist art of the time, introducing to its austere forms a playful irregularity and bodily undertones.
Eva Hesse, No Title, (ink, gouache, watercolour and graphite on paper)
This drawing combines precisely drawn and shaded forms that evoke bodily organs and mechanical objects. Hesse's drawing style became ever more pared down, as she wrote in a letter to her friend, the minimalist sculptor Sol Le Witt: 'drawings clean, clear but crazy like machines... it is weird they become real nonsense'.
Eva Hesse, Tomorrow's Apples (5 In White), 1965, (enamel, gouache, varnish, cord and paper mache on board)
Tomorrow's Apples (5 In White) belongs to an extraordinary group of 14 reliefs Hesse made. These reliefs were her first works in sculpture, constructed using discarded industrial materials aned objects from the factory. Hesse gave them all nonsensical titles.
The form Fillette (Sweeter Version) unmistakably recalls an erect penis yet its title, which means 'little girl' in French, suggests a more nuanced interpretation. This apparent contradiction is typical of Bourgeois' provocative sense of humour and delight in ambiguity. By hanging the sculpture from what looks like a hook, bourgeois wittily rejects the phallus as a symbol of power. She spoke about the phallus evoking feelings of 'tenderness' as well as 'vulnerability and protection, at one point even calling this work 'a little Louise'.
Alice Adams, Expanded Cylinder, 1970, (latex, cloth and foam rubber)
To make this work, Adams pressed chain-link fencing into a piece of foam, removing it and quickly setting the foam with latex before it had time to spring back and lose its shape. This careful transformation of a machined urban material into a soft-looking, fat grid is typical of Adams' sculptural process.
looking closer
This delicate sculpture is made from plastic mesh, used in the construction industry, which Adams coated in liquid latex to hold its undulating or 'pleated' shape.
Adams sourced her materials from the hardware shops in Lower Mahattan, 'our supply store'. She also scoured the local lumberyard, which she said was 'sort of interesting to negotiate in those days when women customers were treated in this kind of desultory way, as if they didn't know what they were looking for. It was a little tense I guess you would call it'.
After graduating in Fine Art from Columbia University in 1953, Alice Adams spent a year in France where she learned to weave. Over the next decade she became a successful weaver and fibre artist, and around 1963 began making 'woven structures' in raw fibres.
The following year, she abandoned textiles to sculpt in industrial metals such as rusted steel cable, tarred rope and chain-link fencing, which she scavenged from the streets or sourced in the hardware stores of lower Manhattan and transformed into imposing and surprisingly organic-looking sculptures. Adams felt these were comparable to fabrics in their ability to expand and compress. 'I find the correspondence between feelings about my own physiological make up and the feelings I have when working with flexible materials in an unfixed space... The tensions and compressions at play in the manipulation of cable, wire mesh, rubber, and cloth demand the same kind of adjustments people make in order to stand up and walk around every day. It's amazing'.
From the 1960s onwards Adams was concerned with expressing ideas about the body in her art, including in her large-scale public commissions of the following decades.
Eva Hesse:
Resin Corner Pieces, 1967, (polyester resin mixed with white latex paint over corner wire lath sections)
Alongside bodies, Adams has always been interested in architecture and its underpinnings. This sculpture belongs to a group of works that feature prefabricated corners used in drywall construction. Their carefully individualised surfaces are, however, surprisingly tactile, almost skin-like.
'My work took a complete about face at this point and the eccentric forms... gave way to the 'corner' pieces, wall casts, and later stud-wall structures... I developed my own kind of minimalism...'
Big Aluminium 2, 1965, (aluminium chain-link fence)
22 Tangle, 1964-68, (rusted steel cable, fluorescent paint and aluminium chain-link fence)
This sculpture was first suspended from the ceiling of the Fischbach Gallery in Lucy Lippard's Eccentric Abstraction, its organic form exuding an 'eery' eroticism. Originally, another sculpture made of lighter-weight aluminium cable was place inside it. According to Adams, this idea was 'Lucy's mischief'.
In 1968, Adams created 22 Tangle by repurposing her sculpture Fluorescent Structure, which was originally placed on the floor underneath Big Aluminium 2. To create the new work, the artist laboriously threaded the cables through a cylinder-shaped length of fencing whose links she had prised open and untwisted one by one. Critics at the time focused on her work's parallels with weaving.
Like much of Adams' sculpture in these years, 22 Tangle is a reborn industrial object: her response to the intense redevelopment of Manhatta in the 1950s and 1960s, she said, had made her 'feel physically injured'.
Eva Hesse (1936-1970) was born in Hamburg, her family settling in New York in 1939 after fleeing Nazi Germany. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Yale University in 1959. Within a few years, Hesse would go on to invent a wholly new sculptural language comprising tangled, bound, weighted, suspended and netted forms. She manipulated her materials in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways, from papier mache and masking tape that she coiled and bound, to using fishing net and fiberglass. She created a body of work that has no parallel in the art of the time. When asked about her work's meaning, Hesse said: 'As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing'.
In 1967 she began to experiment with making sculptures in latex, an unstable material that she knew would deteriorate over time. Her attitude was that art, like life, was absurd: 'Art doesn't last, life doesn't last'. She left behind an important body of work that would transform the way in which sculpture was made and understood. 'Absurdity is the key word', she said, and even her most spare, minimalist sculpture is characterised by bodily presence and playfulness.
No title, 1966, (nets, enamel, string, paper, metal and cord)
No title, 1966, (nets, enamel, string, paper, metal and cord)
Untitled or Not Yet, 1966, (nets, polyethylene, paper, lead weights and cord)
Addendum, 1967, (papier mache, wood, cord)
'Endless repetition can be considered erotic', Hesse wrote in the year she made Addendum. For her, it was 'another way of repeating absurdity'.
In Addendum, meaning 'a thing to be added', Hesse deployed the serial attitude of minimalism but in unexpected and entirely original ways. This work is a major expression of Hesse's approach: a row of breast-like paper mache mounds are spaced at unequal intervals, with too-long cords hanging irregularly from them and coiling onto the floor - the effect at once elegant and absurd.
Louise Bourgeois:
Bourgeois was born in Paris, and moved to New York City in 1938, where she spent the rest of her life. In the mid-1940s, after two exhibitions of paintings, she developed a series of upright, carved wooden figures, which established her as a modernist sculptor. After an intense period of psychoanalysis in the 1950s, during which she made little art, Bourgeois began to create abstract forms in a range of soft and malleable materials such as latex, plaster, resin and wax. She described latex as a 'workshop discovery' and the change in her practice as a shift 'from rigidity to pliability'.
Bourgeois' work in latex gave new form to themes of female eroticism, desire and the unconscious that came to the fore in her work of the 1960s. By the 1970s, the feminist movement recognised her signal importance, claiming Bourgeois for their cause.
Lair, 1962, (painted bronze)
Rondeau For L, 1963, (plaster)
Named after Bourgeois' psychoanalst Dr Lowenfeld, Rondeau for L, with its roiling curves, suggests a tumultous emotional state captured in material form. A 'rondeau' is a style of poem with a repeating refrain. In psychoanalysis, patients return to the same issues as a means of working through them. Bourgeois considered her art in similar terms, as a means of expressing anxiety, desire and rage. 'The materials are my medium', she said. 'They are there to serve me. I'm not there to serve them'.
Portrait, 1963, (latex)
Portrait's knobbly surface looks buckled, as though an internal cavity has been turned inside out. Bourgeois would quickly learn that latex darkens and becomes brittle over time, yet works Like Portrait and Le Regard still retain a sense of softness in spite of these changes. Arguably, the ageing process heightens the fragile and experimental quality of these early latex sculptures.
Le Regard, 1963, (latex over fabric)
Le Regard, which means 'the gaze' in French, reflects Bourgeois deep engagement with theories of psychoanalysis. It explores the psychically charged relationship between unconscious desire, fear and repulsion. Bourgeois displayed this erotic yet abject sculpture at a tilt to reveal its glurinous interior. It was works like this that the feminist critic Lucy Lippard praised as at once 'astoundingly ugly and simultaneously appealing'.
Fee Couturiere, 1962, (painted bronze)
Hanging Janus, 1968, (bronze, dark and polished patina)
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