At Galleria Massimo Minini, the encounter between Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro is not simply a dialogue between two seemingly contrasting practices, but a field of playful tension. On one side, Icaro’s bare, matte, essential matter; on the other, Hicks’s colorful vibrations. The distance is evident, almost structural, and it is precisely there that the project finds its strength.

“Live Wires. Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro”, installation view, 2026, courtesy of the artists and Galleria Massimo Minini, ph. Petrò Gilberti

Seated near her artwork “The Captured Comrades” (2026), noble and stately, Sheila observes the comings and goings around her with a lively gaze. It’s the gaze of a woman who has lived intensely: raised in the Midwest during the Great Depression, with a father frequently traveling for work, she grew up moving from town to town, collecting small treasures of fortune along the way. Writing in 1973, Monique Lévi-Strauss described Sheila Hicks’s life as “a fabric of threads woven together intentionally or by chance, fruitful encounters”. Paolo Icaro also developed his language through play and travel: between the 1960s and 1970s, Italy and the United States, he revolutionized sculptural language by pursuing the need to constantly question everything. A vocation for making that goes beyond the completed and immutable dimension of the object to explore its becoming.

“Live Wires. Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro”, installation view, 2026, courtesy of the artists and Galleria Massimo Minini, ph. Petrò Gilberti

In Live Wires, the works challenge and observe each other. Both artists present creatures drawn directly from the world of dreams. The colorful weave of cotton and synthetic fibers bounces against a bronze tangle: a ping-pong match, which Saverio Verini compares the exhibition to, where the gesture of one generates a reaction in the other. Hicks’s textile lightness doesn’t soften Icaro’s plastic severity, but tests it and vice versa.

“Live Wires. Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro”, installation view, 2026, courtesy of the artists and Galleria Massimo Minini, ph. Petrò Gilberti

Both reject any notion of preciousness. Scrap fabrics, humble materials: for Hicks and Icaro, matter is a living organism to be shaped. Here a first true affinity emerges: the work is not conceived as a definitive form, but as a temporary state. Not only do the works of both often arise through accumulation and layering, but they can also be considered “open”, always susceptible to further transformations. In Hicks, accumulation is chromatic and soft, almost pulsating; in Icaro, it is tension between line and volume, between poetic idea and matter. While Hicks works through sensory saturation, Icaro proceeds by subtraction. Yet both seem interested in that point where form ceases to be pure control and becomes an event – and it is thanks to the foresight and remarkable visual intelligence of Massimo Minini that today we can see the two bodies of work engaging in lively dialogue in the spaces of his gallery.

“Live Wires. Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro”, installation view, 2026, courtesy of the artists and Galleria Massimo Minini, ph. Petrò Gilberti

Here, the role of space is decisive: the gallery, white and virginal, does not remain a neutral container. The works react to verticalities, redefining what surrounds them. This is typical of a generation that, from the 1970s onward, questioned the closed autonomy of the art object, preferring to conceive it as an active relationship with its context. The works of Hicks and Icaro do not ask to be contemplated as finished outcomes; rather, they need to be seen as moments of a research that seeks to remain open. It is perhaps this openness and trust in the process, more than any formal similarity, that constitutes the true common ground of Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro.

Info:

Live Wires. Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro
31/01/2026 – 03/04/2026
Galleria Massimo Minini
Via Luigi Apollonio, 68 – Brescia
www.galleriaminini.it

Chiara Conforti

Chiara has completed her degree in Graphic Design and Communication and previously worked as an art gallery assistant, where she developed a strong passion for art writing. She currently contributes to Arteismo, a digital platform dedicated to art, cinema, and photography. Writing serves as a means to explore new perspectives, enhance critical thinking, and deepen insight into contemporary visual culture.