Some artists paint with colour; others give it a physical presence. Sheila Hicks belongs to the latter. For more than sixty years, she has woven, knotted and layered fibres, transforming an ancient gesture into a strikingly contemporary language poised between painting, sculpture and architecture. Bringing together more than 200 works from international collections, Sheila Hicks. In the Thread of Love is the first Italian retrospective devoted to the American artist. The exhibition spans her entire career, from small, intimate pieces to spectacular installations that take over the surrounding space with masses of fibre and colour. Trained at Yale, Hicks discovered textile traditions during a stay in Chile in the late 1950s, later working across Mexico, South Africa, Morocco and India. For her, thread is never simply a material: it becomes a way to explore identity, marginalisation, encounters between cultures and feminism. Represented in the collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum and the Centre Pompidou, Hicks has helped dissolve the boundary between art and weaving. In Milan, colour and tactility invite visitors to rediscover an elemental pleasure: looking at a material and almost longing to touch it.
