Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams now open at The Courtauld Gallery

Press images are available here: https://tinyurl.com/Abstract-Erotic-The-Courtauld

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, a major new exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, brings together work by three artists who pioneered a visceral and subversive reimagining of sculpture in the mid-20th century, is now open at The Courtauld Gallery.

During the 1960s, Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse produced startling sculptures that combined humour, abstraction and eroticism, made from unconventional materials including latex, rubber, foam, fibreglass, and plaster forges into fleshy mounds, woven metal tangles, and sausage-like suspensions. Dubbed ‘abstract erotic’ by the influential American art critic Lucy Lippard, their radical new work was neither entirely abstract or modernist, figurative or surrealist. Rather their work offered an idiosyncratic, eccentric approach to sculptural form.  

In 1966 Lippard staged the groundbreaking group exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fishbach Gallery in New York, bringing together work by eight contemporary artists using non-traditional materials, which went on to profoundly shape the language and legacy of post-war American sculpture. Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams stood out as the only women in the show, united by their commitment to producing striking, sensuous sculptures that challenged established ideas about modernist form and minimalist geometric order.

Their work signalled an important shift in how sculpture was made. As Lippard later reflected, “I can see now that I was looking for ‘feminist art’’. 

This major exhibition at The Courtauld reunites these three artists for the first time since that important 1966 exhibition, offering a unique opportunity to experience their remarkable work together. The exhibition features 29 sculptures on loan from public and private collections, including Adams’ large-scale undulating suspended sculpture Big Aluminium 2 (1965-2022) and Bourgeois’ bronze Janus Fleuri (1968) combing male and female anatomy.  

Although of different generations, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams were all making art in the 1960s, living and exhibiting in downtown Manhattan. At the time of Lippard’s exhibition, Louise Bourgeois was already an established artist, and by the 1970s was being lauded by a younger generation of emerging female artists. When Eva Hesse died in May 1970 aged just thirty-four, she had already created a considerable legacy and significant body of work much of which is too fragile to travel.  Now in her nineties, Alice Adams continues to make work in her native New York, having focused in the 1970s on undertaking major collaborative outdoor public commissions and architectural installations in airports, university campuses, and other urban sites. This will be the first exhibition of her work in the UK and her first ever in a museum context. 

The exhibition is rooted in the research, teaching and writing of Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art, and Director of the Centre of the Art of the Americas.

To coincide with the exhibition, in the Drawings Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s also co-curated by Jo Applin, presents a group of drawings by Bourgeois from The Easton Foundation, New York, revealing the central role of drawing in her work and its influence on her sculptural practice. 

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams is accompanied by a new catalogue with contributions by Lucy Lippard and art historians Jo Applin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Briony Fer, and Mignon Nixon. 

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams 

20 June – 14 September 2025 

Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3 

https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-abstract-erotic/  

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s
20 Jun – 14 September 2025 

Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, Floor 1 

https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-louise-bourgeois-drawings-from-the-1960s/