Abstract Erotic at the Courtauld

20^th June 2025

Constance Ayrton

Constance Ayrton

20 June 2025

In 1966, the critic and curator Lucy Lippard staged her first exhibition, a modest affair at the Fischbach Gallery on Madison Avenue, gathering together a group of young artists experimenting with the sensuous possibilities of abstraction. She called it Eccentric Abstraction: a title that seems, in retrospect, both apt and a little shy of the mark. The artists in question – Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois – were engaged in something far more unruly and ambiguous than mere formal play. They were pulling abstraction bodily into the realm of the erotic, into a zone of materials that dripped, sagged, dangled and bulged, where desire and disgust became indistinguishable.

Now, nearly 60 years on, the Courtauld revisits this moment in a tightly focused show, retitled with a wink as Abstract Erotic. It is a name that gestures towards the eroticism latent in the original, but also acknowledges how elusive, how abstracted, desire can be. There are fewer than 30 works on view, spread across two modest rooms. Yet what these rooms lack in scale they make up for in a peculiar, charged intimacy: a sense of proximity not only to the objects themselves but to the tentative gestures of their making.

These works sit somewhere between humour and discomfort. Hesse’s latex and papier-mâché forms hang from hooks and cords like fragments of half-remembered dreams. In Addendum, a row of lumpy, rounded shapes sends long, limp strands trailing down to the floor – they might suggest breasts, udders or something harder to name. Elsewhere, her hanging forms, a pear-shaped bulb and a blackened phallus, seem to play out a surreal encounter. The effect is both strange and amusing, recalling the Surrealists’ interest in the unconscious: what you see here might reveal something hidden within yourself.

Alice Adams, though less well-known today than Hesse or Bourgeois, works in a noticeably different mode. Her materials (cable, chain-link, foam) seem to resist easy handling, their tensions locked firmly in place. In Expanded Cylinder, the impression of fencing pressed into latexed foam resembles aged, cracked skin, like reptile hide. In Sheath, a cotton cord pierces through a sack-like form of woven cord, fraying and appearing to unravel at the bottom. These are sculptures that seem to ask for a hand to press against them, to test their resistance. That tactility points not only to Adams’s background in weaving but also to the stubbornness of the materials she favours. Her works feel caught in a state of tension; neither fully formed nor fully falling apart.

Bourgeois’s contributions are characteristically brazen, sly and full of provocation. Time has not been kind to some of her materials. Latex desiccates, fabric yellows, but these ravages only amplify her themes. Le Regard, a shrivelled, brown, vulva-like form, speaks as much of decay as of desire. Her infamous Fillette, a dangling, phallic object wrapped like a baby, still unsettles: is this something to laugh at, to cradle or to fear? Bourgeois’s brilliance lies in how she holds all possibilities open at once, never settling for an answer. In Hanging Janus, a double form somewhere between a croissant and a sex toy, somewhere between buttocks and breasts, the tips are worn smooth, as though fondled over time. It’s a sculpture made for the gaze that lingers a little too long.

What feels most radical about Abstract Erotic is not the forms themselves, but the way they open space for imagination and uncertain interpretation. This is not an exhibition for those seeking something simply beautiful or easily understood. These works emerge from a moment of raw, unapologetic exploration of sexuality, the body and desire. They draw us into spaces of discomfort, ambiguity and fascination. They remind us, too, that the body, with all its appetites, frailties and unruly impulses, remains one of the most complex and compelling terrains for art to explore.

Constance Ayrton
Photos: Installation view of Louise Bourgeois. Drawings from the 1960s, The Courtauld © Fergus Carmichael

Abstract Erotic is at the Courtauld from 20^th June until 14^th September 2025. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.