Abstract Erotic review – artworks as beguiling as they are compelling

The Courtauld, LondonWith works by Alice Adams, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, this exhibition revisits a 1966 show of pieces delving into the psychosexual and the human bodyPendulous, scuttling, slapstick, sinister and ribald, Abstract Erotic revisits a moment in 1966 when the young American critic and curator Lucy Lippard brought together the work of three women in New York in a larger show of eight artists at the Fischbach Gallery then on Madison Avenue. It was originally titled Eccentric Abstraction, but the eccentrically abstract isn’t nearly as sexy as the erotic – yet somehow neither title quite fits the strange and compelling sculptures and little objects, drawings and reliefs by Alice Adams, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois that, even 60 years on, are as alive as ever they were.Eccentric Abstraction was the first exhibition Lippard had ever curated, and was, she said, “an attempt to blur boundaries, in this case between minimalism and something more sensuous and sensual – that is, in retrospect, something more feminist” – although, at the time, feminism was far from her mind. The exhibition was crucial in the development of the now 88-year-old’s thinking and her subsequent activism. Continue reading...

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Abstract Erotic is obscene, grotesque – and unmissable

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