Born into a family of merchants with diverse roots – Scottish, Dutch, Welsh, Cherokee, Sheila Hicks enrolled at Yale University in 1954, where she took classes with the likes of historic Bauhaus figure and famed colour theorist Josef Albers, as well as with George Kubler, a historian specialising in pre-Columbian art. This education would lastingly encourage her to persevere on her chosen artistic path, that of creating textile works that brought down the barriers between fine arts and applied arts.

In her own practice, while she was creating small, abstractexpressionistic paintings, she produced her first Minimes in 1956, tiny weavings that served as testing grounds for her future creations. She travelled through Latin America in 1957-58 to deepen her knowledge of weaving and embroidery techniques, then spent a year in France, where she met Raoul d’Harcourt, a specialist in pre-Inca textiles whose writings would have a decisive influence on her final dissertation.

Hicks’s work is in dialogue with the architecture surrounding it. This proclivity was sparked during her student years in modernist architect Louis Kahn’s classes at Yale, then intensified during her residence in Mexico, where she befriended the architects Félix Candela, Mathias Goeritz, and Luis Barragán. Over time it came to profoundly inform her practice, and led to projects with Eero Saarinen, Warren Platner, Gyo Obata, SOM, Kajima, Junzo Sakakura, Nikken Sekkei, Theo Crosby, and Kevin Roche, among others.

In the mid-1960s, after four years in Mexico, she moved to Paris and has lived there ever since, continuing her research at the crossroads of art, design and decoration. In her seamless blend of modernism, abstraction and extra-Western traditions and savoir-faire, her sculptures and environments composed of wool, nylon, silk, linen or cotton sometimes merge with utilitarian objects, such as clothing, and can also become functional themselves, establishing spaces in which visitors are invited to wander, lie down and lounge.

Whether they are stacks of large fibre bales, cascades of colourful creepers, columns of pigmented threads or even wool-wrapped flexible tubes, her works give pride of place to the materials that dictate their forms. Her pieces are subject to the laws of gravity and determined by the architecture of the spaces exhibiting them, hanging vertically and bending horizontally when they touch the ground, works that are erected and stabilised by virtue of their own weight, in a spectrum of colours that modify one’s perception of the space they inhabit. Hicks refuses to give her works any fixed and definite form, creating them in a spirit of free experimentation that evolves with the weaving process, with no other purpose than its own existence. Her ductile, labile sculptures prefigure the Anti-Form and Post-Minimalist movements that made extensive use of textile.