For more than half a century, Paris-based American artist Sheila Hicks has been a distinctive figure on the international art scene. In the early 1960s, she lived in Mexico, where she became close to architect Luis Barragán and artist Mathias Goeritz, who both encouraged her to continue on the new road she had opened up with her textile works. In the years that followed, she worked with weavers in India and Morocco before moving to Paris.

At the Centre Pompidou this winter, pieces of different periods form a highly colourful, monumental installation. The exhibition "Sheila Hicks, Lignes de Vie" (Life Lines) is on view Feb. 7 to April 30, 2018. Non-chronologically arranged, this allows visitors to explore for themselves, following their own eyes, the guiding themes of a body of work that celebrates colour, material and form. In counterpoint, a display of several dozen “Minimes”, very small format weavings, offer a glimpse into the “research laboratory” that lies behind the artist’s whole production.

The exhibition highlights Sheila Hicks’ unique way of weaving together non-Western traditions and modernist forms, the legacy of the Bauhaus and aspects of Anti-Form, in a work balanced at the intersection between the applied arts and contemporary art. The exhibition is completed by a range of photographic and video documentation that offers a glimpse of the artist’s manner of working and her travels and encounters.