Curators Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin walk and talk withArt+Auction’s Sara Roffino about a few of the groundbreaking works in “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculptures by Women, 1947-2016,” the debut show at Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel in downtown Los Angeles.

As Hauser Wirth & Schimmel unveils its newly renovated, 100,000-square-foot exhibition space in the heart of downtown Los Angeles on March 13, it will reveal far more than one of the world’s largest commercial art venues. Inaugurating the space is “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016,” a near-comprehensive rewrite of the modern and contemporary history of sculpture and the kind of exhibition that is the signature of gallery partner Paul Schimmel, the former chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Winding through seven separate buildings that previously functioned as the longest-active flour mill in Los Angeles, the exhibition roughly follows the decade-by-decade trajectory of the past 70 years of abstract sculpture. With works by heavyweights like Louise Nevelson andLynda Benglis, the long-overlooked Senga Nengudi, and the youngest artist in the show, Abigail Deville, curators Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin challenge the forces that have prevented these artists from receiving recognition equal to that of their male counterparts while illustrating the ways in which female sculptors have written their own history with their own materials and their own lineage. A significant number of these artists chose to live outside the art world, focusing on their studios and practices rather than socializing and self-promotion, leading perhaps to less exposure but without compromise in the rigor, importance, or brilliance of their work.

Louise Bourgeois

“Personages” are the first pieces for which Bourgeois became known, and the earliest body of work explored in “Revolution in the Making.” Some of them specifically reference totems, Oceanic art, and the human body, while others, like Untitled (The Wedges), 1950, visibly build on a formal history using wood and stacking forms in ways that characterize some of the most advanced works of Constantin Brancusi. Bourgeois had a unique background. She both looked at the history of modernism from the vantage point of mid 20th-century France and understood the more universal forms that come out of Oceanic and primitive art. Her husband, Robert Goldwater, was a leading scholar of African art and the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York.  —PAUL SCHIMMEL

Ruth Asawa

Asawa created one of the earliest examples of wirework in our show. Some people say her work is crocheted, but it’s not quite crochet—she looped the wire to build a textile-like construction. This piece, Untitled (S.304), 1967, is a five-lobed hanging structure made of handwoven brass wire and is the largest sculpture she ever made. It is an exploration of a continuous line that forms a complex lattice, ultimately resulting in this very flexible grid that softens the hard geometries of modernist sculpture. Asawa comes out of a much more interdisciplinary background than many of the artists in “Revolution in the Making.” She attended Black Mountain College, where she worked closely with Josef and Anni Albers; she also studied with Merce Cunningham and was familiar with his groundbreaking work in dance. She saw herself as an artist in the round, rather than just a sculptor; a whole artist capable of working in a multiplicity of media.  —JENNI SORKIN

Lee Bontecou

Starting as a sculptor, Bontecou increasingly moved into a body of work that consists of dramatic bas-relief forms made with a series of planes and voids using wire armatures and canvas. Untitled, 1964, anticipated the move to shaped canvases and the use of positive and negative space, with which artists like Frank Stella are most often credited. The void, the breaking through of the homogeneity of the canvas surface into these black spaces, places her works right between painting and sculpture. In 1958–59, she returned from Italy when Alberto Burri, who was a great influence on her, encouraged Leo Castelli to represent her just as he opened his gallery in New York. From early in her career (and again now) she was very highly regarded, but she chose, like others in this exhibition, to step back from the art world. She’s among the oldest generation in the exhibition, and her legacy is present throughout the show in the work of younger artists like Lara Schnitger, Kaari Upson, and Shinique Smith.  –PS

Eva Hesse

This is the first time Hesse’s Aught and Augment, both 1968, are being shown together since they were exhibited in “9 at Leo Castelli,” organized by sculptor Robert Morris at the dealer’s uptown warehouse in 1968. Hesse was the only woman in that seminal show, which was among the earliest exhibitions to define post-Minimalism, with its unstructured approach to new materials. One of these bas-relief works is wall mounted, and the other is laid out on the floor. They deal very clearly with the relationship between painting and sculpture, the effects of weight and gravity, and the relationship between the object and the base. The layering of the beautifully toned latex and canvas sheets in Augment, which represents skin, combined with the subtlety of the four-paneled wall work Aught, which has a skeletal armature, provides a kind of undulating surface that references abstraction and the body in the most elemental way.  —PS

Jackie Winsor

One of the real privileges of doing a major revisionist group exhibition is engaging with artists who have had a significant impact on the history of art but have never really been recognized outside artistic circles. Winsor is one of these remarkable artists. The seriality of Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd had an impact on her, but she was also very much drawing upon the landscape and her own history in Nova Scotia. With 30 to 1 Bound Trees, 1971–72/2016, she took 30 white birch saplings and used heavy rope, which became a signature of her work, to bind them together into one. The title reveals the structure of the work, which references the artist’s upbringing in Nova Scotia and her family history. Her early works used natural materials to address primary forms and structures—there are squares, triangles, and in this case a remake of the classic column, which comes out of the history of art but is made with materials that are organic rather than monumental and institutional.  —PS

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Abakanowicz is considered to be one of Poland’s most famous artists. She started out making fiber sculptures in the form of large-scale tapestries and weavings, working off the loom so as not to be confined to two-dimensional or grid-based structures. Wheel with Rope, 1973, is also an earlier piece, but is a bit different from many of her other works of this period. It’s a really large-scale sculpture that has a relationship to industry and textiles. She acquired the materials by dredging rope from the harbor in Warsaw after the war, because there was a real poverty of access to art supplies. Later, living under Communism, she was shut out from getting any materials or having a studio space, so part of her choice to work with textiles was that they could be folded up and stored in very small places. After dredging the rope she would unwind and reuse it, which creates a found quality in a lot of the textiles she uses. The heavy industrial material of Wheel with Rope becomes a nice counterbalance to the minimal work that was happening a decade earlier in that it is unwound: it’s loose, it’s large, and it is made by a woman.  —JS

Hannah Wilke

Wilke, who in some respects was first known for her relationship to early Pop art, crossed back and forth between object making and performance art. She consistently played with her identity both as a subject and as a kind of object, and in the early 1970s she began a series of works that reflected her own sense of her psyche and her body. Mellow Yellow, 1975, is among the more ambitious works from her “Blossoms” series, from which we are showing five individual pieces. It is a very powerful representation of Wilke’s changing relationship to materials—she is using latex as a kind of metaphor for skin and the body. As a series, “Blossoms” is significant as unstructured sculptures that fold away like flower petals while simultaneously representing genitalia. The series references Georgia O’Keeffe and her works from the 1920s, where flowers and the human body were folded together in works that were neither purely abstract nor purely figurative. In some ways, those works are O’Keeffe’s most intimate, and I think the same can be said of Wilke’s “Blossoms” series.  —PS

Hannah Wilke had a bodily orientation in her practice. She studied ceramics, and some of her earliest work is of ceramic labial folds. These are small, but there’s a real presence to them, a symbiotic relation between body and object. Mellow Yellow, one of the larger works from the “Blossoms” series, is made of cut-out latex folds that are held together with metal snaps on a board, so there’s an overlay between what’s considered to be a soft material and the metallic, shiny material of the snap. There’s almost a fabric-like quality to them, but they’re also like hanging folds of skin. Part of Wilke’s interest in this work comes from her investment in feminist ideologies and histories, and making work from a woman’s vantage point. She began using latex in the early 1970s; she would make thin sheets of pigments and then assemble them to make these flowering forms. They are very vaginal and they hang on the wall, and yet it’s a fragmented body—it’s not an entire representation of the body, it’s not literal, it’s not figurative. It’s a very abstracted and fragmented way of representing the body. Wilke was making abstract sculptural forms without overtly representing the body, and yet she had an investment in feminist politics in a way that many artists in the show did not. She was very much a part of feminist communities in New York and Los Angeles, so it’s interesting to have her in this exhibition that is not about overt feminist content.  —JS

Gego

Gego’s open, stainless steel wire is building upon a Surrealist tradition of drawing in space. It captures the kind of informality one might see in a drawing on a piece of paper, but this is actually a drawing in space with wire that addresses the tensions between representation and illusion and between two- and three-dimensional spaces. Like Buckminster Fuller, Gego was interested in using repeated geometric forms to capture space without trying to define it in a concrete fashion. This Reticulárea, 1975, is among the largest of the series and is more fieldlike and immersive, while others are armatures that come off the wall and have an engineered, architectural quality. Still others are more sculptural. Gego really broke down this boundary between architectural space, three-dimensional relief surface, and the support—the wall, a corner, or the floor. In many respects Gego kept her distance from the art world, in part because she had a desire to create her own language that was not tied to the neo-constructivist movement of Latin America, the Surrealism of Europe, or the Postminimalist work of American artists that dominated the dialogue during this period.  —PS

Gego was a German émigré to Venezuela, so she comes out of a cultural context having nothing to do with feminist thought. She’s a formalist, invested in the purity of the line, and a peer of other Venezuelans including Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Rafael Soto, practitioners who have long been prominent in Latin America but have only more recently been introduced to American audiences. Gego was working with concepts of space—articulating space or delineating it through wire constructions. Part of her interest in this investigation is about endless form and the idea of proliferating form—the sculpture can continuously grow or the work can become room-size in certain installations and shrink down for others. It becomes almost like a netting or a web that fills a space in an infinite way. All of her works are very ephemeral and tenuous looking—this is also what underscores their poetry. Formal abstraction is key throughout this exhibition, and Gego’s work serves as a way station for a large number of women who use wire as a form of drawing.  —JS

Ursula von Rydingsvard

Like Abakanowicz, von Rydingsvard comes out of an Eastern European context that held a kind of deprivation. Her parents were Eastern European refugees in East Germany, where the family lived until 1950 when they emigrated to the United States before the artist’s 10th birthday. Untitled (Nine Cones), 1976, is a transitional work in her oeuvre because it was made around the time she discovered and started making sculpture in cedar, which is quite malleable and creates a real materiality in her work. She uses a lot of open forms, carving into the piece to make shapes. This is one of her more minimal early pieces. There’s a repetition of nine forms that stand almost four feet tall; they are arranged in rows and the scale is fairly large—it’s almost human scale. Following this, von Rydingsvard went on to make much larger-scale public commissions and to rub graphite into the cedar to change the color and texture of her works.  —JS

Isa Genzken

Genzken’s cast-concrete sculptural works, like Vogelnest (Bird’s Nest), 1989, pick up the trajectory of those such as Bourgeois’s wedges in terms of abstraction and the use of continuing forms, repetitions, and seriality. They function almost as models for unrealizable architectural elements, so these pieces of cast concrete represent structures or private places of architectural imagination. They deliberately reengage the relationship between the object and the base, as the bases themselves are part of the sculptures; they are structural armatures on which the concrete rests. In some ways Genzken was responding to Minimalism by taking these primary forms and structures and turning them into something more eccentric, with a greater sense of their own making. And unlike that of the Minimalists, Genzken’s works don’t have that factory-produced fit and finished aesthetic.  —PS

Jessica Stockholder

Found material is so popular now, and Stockholder was one of the first artists to start working with it in a profound way. She is a pivotal artist—not only because she teaches and has been very influential on several generations of younger artists, but because, beginning in the late 1980s, she started making really large-scale, installation-based work with found material and reworking the material to highlight architectural spaces. Kissing the Wall #5 with Yellow, 1990, part of a larger series from which we’re showing a few works, is made of spools of thread piled high on a found chair. There’s a fluorescent light shining behind it that is splattered in yellow paint so it all becomes one piece of a structure even though it’s many different parts. She’s really pushed the boundaries between painting and sculpture, not unlike Robert Rauschenberg, who drove a wedge between painting and sculpture with his combines. Stockholder is doing the same thing and breaking down a gender barrier as well.  —JS

Shinique Smith

Though she works between painting and sculpture, I would call Smith an installation artist. All of her textile pieces are made from found materials, which she reworks by sewing in ribbon and adding rope and small objects. She has a very intuitive way of working, integrating influences from the visual culture around her into her pieces. Smith started out doing graffiti, so sometimes she flattens out the work and does design on the walls to extend the sculpture—she’s working between the second and third dimensions and not making distinctions between one and the other. We commissioned Forgiving Strands, 2015–16, to install in a breezeway of the building—it’s alone, but placed in an interstitial space that joins other spaces, and you can walk underneath and around it, so it’s not constrained in a corner. Smith’s practice is highly abstract; she’s not interested in having a narrative attached to her work, but there is an almost metaphorical potential there—the building itself becomes a body from which the work hangs. She’s also doing a lot of stuffing, tying, twisting, and bundling—these textile-based processes are among the key elements of her practice. Smith isn’t directly influenced by Abakanowicz per se, but she’s working off-loom in the way that Abakanowicz pioneered, so you see the same concerns, doubling back and coming into play again.  —JS