Abstract Erotic
When I walked into the Courtauld Gallery this summer, I was immediately struck by the intimacy of their new exhibition, Abstract Erotic. Spread across just two rooms, the show feels less like a grand institutional display and more like an invitation into a private, tactile world. It brings together three artists—Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams—who were part of Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Lippard once used the phrase “abstract erotic” to describe some of the most sensual, bodily works in that show, and here the Courtauld expands on that idea, giving it new resonance in 2025.
What I found most compelling was the materiality. Latex, rubber, papier-mâché, netting, and resin dominate the space. These are not cold, minimal objects; they pulse with suggestion, humour, and sometimes discomfort. Bourgeois’s Fillette (Sweeter Version), for instance, confronts the viewer with its double-edged form—at once comic, vulnerable, and deeply provocative. Standing in front of it, I felt that mix of seduction and repulsion critics often talk about, as if the piece was daring me to look and recoil in the same breath.
Hesse’s Addendum stopped me in my tracks. A line of papier-mâché orbs, each dangling a cord, transforms the gallery wall into something uncanny and bodily—like a chorus of suspended organs. Elsewhere, her suspended forms in netting appear almost weightless, yet their associations with breasts, udders, or phallic shapes are inescapable. I could sense the way she disrupted the strictness of minimalism with something messy, organic, and deeply human.
Adams, whose work I hadn’t known as well, felt like the revelation of the show. Her Big Aluminium II, a mesh tube falling gracefully from the ceiling, seemed to breathe as I walked around it. Industrial materials suddenly suggested stockings, wombs, or skin. She manages to blur the line between hard, architectural structure and erotic presence, and I found myself circling her pieces just to experience their changing silhouettes.
What lingered with me after leaving was how tactile everything felt, even though I couldn’t touch a single work. In a world dominated by screens and instant imagery, these objects insist on slower looking, on imagining textures and sensations. Abstract Erotic isn’t just about sex or desire—it’s about embodiment, vulnerability, and the strangeness of our own physical selves. I walked out of the Courtauld feeling both unsettled and exhilarated, as if I had glimpsed the hidden pulse beneath abstraction itself.
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