The Easel

Archives: Katie Tobin

1st July 2025

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

A 1966 sculpture exhibition in New York featured work that was breaking away from minimalism for something more sensuous. It earned the title ‘eccentric abstraction’. That sensibility has endured and appears in a London show via works that focus on body parts and textures. Erotic it is not, with “bulging, drooping sculptures” and “various turdlike piles and unpleasant growths and cavities”. It’s more a confrontation with “bodiness” – the works are “very tempting to touch”. A video (4 min) is here.