Abstract Erotic

20 Jun – 14 Sept 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3

This major exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams at The Courtauld Gallery foregrounds their shared commitment to using humour and abstract form to ask important questions about sexuality and bodies.

The influential critic and curator Lucy Lippard dubbed this kind of work ‘abstract erotic’, and in 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams were the only women artists included in Lippard’s ground-breaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Prior to the emergence of the women’s movement, these artists engaged with a feminist politics of the body with their visceral, playful, and abstract forms in materials such as latex, expanding foam, string, and plaster. As Lippard later reflected, ‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”’.

This is the first time The Courtauld will stage an ambitious group exhibition of this kind, with three-dimensional works suspended from the ceiling and abstract sculpture filling the gallery spaces in bold and unconventional ways. Abstract Erotic features important loans from distinguished public and private collections in Europe and America, many of which are rarely seen due to their inherent fragility.

Alongside iconic 20th century artists Bourgeois and Hesse, the exhibition celebrates Alice Adams, whose extraordinary sculptural works of the 1960s are of equivalent power and originality. This is the first exhibition of her work in the UK and the first ever in a museum context.

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Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s will be on display in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, Floor 2 from 20 Jun – 14 Sept 2025.