Tickets on sale – Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams.

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams. A serious exhibition from The Courtauld (20 Jun – 14 Sep 2025)

This summer season, expertise extraordinary sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams at The Courtauld Gallery. Three pioneering artists of the twentieth century who, in Nineteen Sixties New York, produced startling new our bodies of labor turning trendy sculpture on its head.  

The exhibition foregrounds their shared dedication to utilizing humour and summary kind to ask essential questions on sexuality and our bodies.

The influential critic and curator Lucy Lippard dubbed this type of work ‘summary erotic’, and in 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams had been the one ladies artists included in Lippard’s ground-breaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Previous to the emergence of the ladies’s motion, these artists engaged with a feminist politics of the physique with their visceral, playful, and summary varieties in supplies corresponding to latex, increasing foam, string, and plaster. As Lippard later mirrored, ‘I can see now that I used to be searching for “feminist artwork”’.

That is the primary time The Courtauld will stage an bold group exhibition of this type, with three-dimensional works suspended from the ceiling and summary sculpture filling the gallery areas in daring and unconventional methods. Summary Erotic options essential loans from distinguished private and non-private collections in Europe and America, a lot of that are not often seen as a consequence of their inherent fragility.

Alongside iconic twentieth century artists Bourgeois and Hesse, the exhibition celebrates Alice Adams, whose extraordinary sculptural works of the Nineteen Sixties are of equal energy and originality. That is the primary exhibition of her work within the UK and the primary ever in a museum context.

The exhibition is grounded within the analysis and educating of Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor within the Historical past of Artwork, most notably her 2012 e-book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in Nineteen Sixties America. Applin is Director of the Centre of the Artwork of the Americas at The Courtauld Institute of Artwork, and co-curated the exhibition with Dr Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Ornamental Arts at The Courtauld Gallery.

Supported by The Huo Household Basis.

To coincide with the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s shall be offered within 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 show will current a daring group of drawings by Bourgeois, revealing the central function of drawing in her work and its affect on her sculptural observe.

Tickets to Summary Erotic embody entry to Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the Nineteen Sixties and the everlasting assortment.

Summary Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams
20 June – 14 September 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Flooring 3

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the Nineteen Sixties
20 Jun – 14 September 2025
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, Flooring 1

The programme of shows within the Drawings Gallery is generously supported by the Worldwide Music and Artwork Basis, with extra help from James Bartos. Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the Nineteen Sixties can also be supported by the Tavolozza Basis.