Cosmic Jewelry by Sheila Hicks
Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery is honoured to unveil Cosmic Jewelry during the opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia at the Monaco & Grand Canal Hotel in Venice (6–10 May 2026). Marking the first collection of unique jewellery by Sheila Hicks, who for over seven decades has conducted fibre into a language of emotion, tension, and living colour.
Throughout her career, Hicks has treated thread as architecture and colour as structure. Her works, whether monumental installations or intimate compositions, breathe with an internal rhythm: soft yet disciplined, spontaneous yet precise. In her hands, fibre becomes both material and metaphor.
Conceived over two years through a close dialogue between the artist, Atelier L & L (Louise Zanartu & Louis Boudart), and Elisabetta Cipriani, the collection brings together one-of-a-kind pendants and brooches in gold and silver, where silk, cotton and linen entwine with pearls, minerals, stones, and fragments of precious metal. These adornments carry the joyous, chromatic intensity and tactile immediacy of larger sculptures, while enhancing their intimate, sensual essence.
Cosmic Jewellery draws inspiration from two central forms in Hicks’ practice: the sculptural Boules and the intimate Minimes. The Boules, spheres composed of threads wrapped around a core often formed from garments once belonging to friends or family, are affectionately described by the artist as her “memory bundles.” The Minimes, small experimental studies created on a portable loom, function as personal sketchbooks through which the artist explores colour, texture, and structure.
Translated into wearable form, these works become miniature constellations and landscapes: fibre held in tension around precious matter, colour acting as structure, thread enclosing light. Rather than adapting the work to jewellery, the artist allows each piece to emerge organically, preserving the gestures and layered compositions that define the language of art.
About the Artist
Born in 1934 in Hastings, Nebraska, Sheila Hicks has been based in Paris since 1964.She studied painting at the Yale School of Art under Josef Albers, and developed a deep interest in ancient Andean textile through the teachings of art historian George Kubler. The artist lived in Chile and Mexico, and drew inspiration from work sessions in India, Morocco, Japan and South Africa.Hicks is returning to Venice to present Cosmic Jewellery following her monumental installations at the Venice Biennale in 2017, the artist will continue her engagement with Italy in November 2026 with the opening of a solo exhibition at the PAC Milano (Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea).
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