Sheila Hicks 

Nuit Blanche 2020

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris & Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Born in 1934 in the United States, Sheila Hicks lives and works in Paris. A pupil of Josef Albers at Yale, she is heir to a modernist spirit, where the boundaries between art, design and decoration are no longer essential, and textile practices inspired by pre-Columbian America. Since the end of the 1950s, she has produced an unclassifiable work, which revisits the popular artisanal textile tradition and blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Sheila Hicks' work is a process that results in a real interaction between her works and the viewer, as well as with the architecture in which they are presented.

The artist's work inhabits the colonnades located between the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and the Palais de Tokyo. In this massive and majestic architectural environment, it introduces a set of moving comets, which invite the viewer to perceive and confront the relationship between permanence and ephemeral. This constellation takes on a magical character. It reminds us of our fleeting presence in the world by inviting the viewer to look beyond. Along with its presentation for Nuit Blanche, a recent and important acquisition by the artist is presented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.