Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams. A major exhibition from The Courtauld (20 Jun – 14 Sep 2025)
This summer, experience extraordinary sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams at The Courtauld Gallery. Three pioneering artists of the 20th century who, in 1960s New York, produced startling new bodies of work turning modern sculpture on its head.
The exhibition 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.
The exhibition is grounded in the research and teaching of Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art, most notably her 2012 book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America. Applin is Director of the Centre of the Art of the Americas at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and co-curated the exhibition with Dr Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Courtauld Gallery.
Supported by The Huo Family Foundation.
To coincide with the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s will be presented in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, co-curated by Jo Applin and Dr Ketty Gottardo, Martin Halusa Senior Curator of Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery. The display will present a bold group of drawings by Bourgeois, revealing the central role of drawing in her work and its influence on her sculptural practice.
Tickets to Abstract Erotic include entry to Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s and the permanent collection.
Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams
20 June – 14 September 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3
Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s
20 Jun – 14 September 2025
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, Floor 1
The programme of displays in the Drawings Gallery is generously supported by the International Music and Art Foundation, with additional support from James Bartos. Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s is also supported by the Tavolozza Foundation.
