Abstract Erotic

Artists

Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams

Press release

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.