Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld

‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”.’ So said the feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard of her influential ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ show, staged at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966. With the city’s art scene dominated by Minimalism and Conceptualism, Lippard’s exhibition marked a turning point in post-war sculpture by bringing together artists who worked with unconventional, often unstable, materials, including latex, rubber, foam, string, fibreglass, papier-mâché, netting, and wire. But of all the works on display, it was those by female artists – Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse – that drew the most interest from critics and the public. Through their shared commitment to experimentation, humour, and repetition, their art brought a renewed urgency to the unconscious and female eroticism. Now, The Courtauld gallery in London reunites their works for the first time since Lippard’s show.

For all the titillating promise of its title, ‘Abstract Erotic’ is not an exhibition explicitly about sexuality. Hesse famously spoke of ‘uckiness’ in her art, and these pieces deliver it in spades. If they verge on the grotesque, even the repellant, that’s precisely the point. Some of the latex here has weathered like rotting flesh. But as Mignon Nixon explains in her accompanying essay, Bourgeois’ Portrait (1963) – a congealed mass of burgundy latex lumps, ‘like some scabrous apron or placental lining’ – shows the medium’s capacity for transformation.

As a keen follower of Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois most viscerally confronted bodiliness and its discontents through fleshy, entrail-like forms. Suspended from a meat hook, Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99) resembles a mummified penis but remains anatomically and insistently ambiguous. Made from pigmented urethane rubber, it’s one of several bulging, drooping sculptures – Hesse’s bulbous paper and metal balls in nets are not to be missed – that skew more phallic. To balance this, the vitrine at the show’s entrance houses Bourgeois’ aptly named Tits (1967) alongside Adams’ woven steel cable structures that loop and twist over themselves. As Hesse said: ‘Endless repetition can be erotic.’

If Bourgeois used her repetitive drawings to ‘unearth memories’ – also on show downstairs from ‘Abstract Erotic’ – then Adams takes up abstraction to think through the gendered logics of architecture: presence, and what it means to make space for oneself. A scathing response to Manhattan’s redevelopment in the 1950s and 1960s, 22 Tangle (1964-68) is a reborn industrial object made from rusted steel cable, fluorescent paint and a scavenged chain-link fence. For Adams, bodies, like buildings, are sites of enclosure and shelter; both histories of containment and resistance. Although Threaded Grid (1964) and Threaded Drain Plate (1964) are made of much sturdier stuff than her early fibre works, they also gesture towards the domestic toil and drudgery of ‘women’s work’ in and out of the home.

Adams remains the least known of the trio, and while her inclusion here feels necessary, even urgent, her sculptures don’t always hold the same formal tension or psychic charge as those of Hesse or Bourgeois. Yet they are still well worth seeing, if only for the giant aluminium sculptures alone. Doubtless, the most arresting works are the most tactile, the most primordial. With her curation, Lippard wanted to ‘invite touch’; at the Courtauld, the response these sculptures summon might sit in that strange place between curious arousal and repulsion, but they are very tempting to touch indeed.

‘Abstract Erotic’, until 14 September 2025 at The Courtauld, courtauld.ac.uk