Overview

This ambitious new catalogue highlights the erotic and playful sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, foregrounding their shared commitment to using abstract form to ask important questions about fluid sexuality, bodies and humour. It accompanies a major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. In 1966, the groundbreaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, held at the Fischbach Gallery, in New York, launched the career of Bourgeois, Hesse and Adams. It would profoundly shape the language and legacy of post-war American sculpture. This book returns us to this pivotal moment and, in bringing together these three important artists for the first time since 1966, explores the emergence of a new form of ‘abstract erotic’ sculpture. Abstract Erotic brings together a series of internationally recognised scholars of the three artists, presenting new insights into their practice, and its wider relevance to the art of the 1960s until now. By putting the work of Alice Adams in conversation with the work of established figures Bourgeois and Hesse, it aims to bring her work to the attention of a wider public. The Courtauld Gallery, London 20 Jun – 14 Sept 2025 Published by Paul Holberton Publishing

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9781913645809

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Jo Applin is Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art and the author of several books, including Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Theory at Columbia University and the author of several books Briony Fer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at UCL and curator of exhibitions by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and others. Lucy R. Lippard, author of the groundbreaking monograph Eva Hesse (1976) is an American activist, feminist, art critic, and curator noted for her many articles and books on contemporary art Mignon Nixon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, UCL and the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art.

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