Abstract Erotic

This ambitious new catalogue highlights the erotic and playful sculpture of LouiseBourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, foregrounding their shared commitmentto using abstract form to ask important questions about fluid sexuality, bodies andhumour. It accompanies a major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.In 1966, the groundbreaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, held at the FischbachGallery, New York, launched the career of Bourgeois, Hesse and Adams. It wouldprofoundly shape the language and legacy of post-war American sculpture. Thisbook returns us to this pivotal moment and, in bringing together these threeimportant artists for the first time since 1966, explores the emergence of a newform of ‘abstract erotic’ sculpture.Abstract Erotic brings together a series of internationally recognised scholars ofthe three artists, presenting new insights into their practice, and its wider relevanceto the art of the 1960s until now. And by putting the work of Alice Adams inconversation with the work of established figures Bourgeois and Hesse, it aims tobring her work to the attention of a wider public.