Hessie’s Soft Resistance at La Verrière
The Poésie Balistique (“Ballistic Poetry”) season has kicked off at La Verrière with Soft Resistance, a solo exhibition of Hessie (b. 1936), her first in Belgium. Curator Guillaume Desanges invited the Caribbean-born artist, who has been living and working in France since 1962, to the Brussels art space run by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
A black female practitioner in what is still a predominantly white, male art world, Hessie sublimates her experience as a migrant and mother of five in her work. The painstakingly stitched abstract pieces immediately evokes postminimalist art from the 1960’s and 70’s, when she started to produce these works. The subtle, tactile surfaces belie the labor-intensive stitching process, achieving an organic effect through the delicate, handmade allusion to the infinite. While Hessie herself has been known to call her practice “Survival Art”, Soft Resistance shows that she has thrived as a representative of the French feminist movement of the 1970’s.
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