Louise Bourgeois

New Works

10 October - 17 November 2007

London

'My memories are moth eaten…. I have taken my memories into my arms and have soothed them.’

Nothing to Remember, 2004 – 2006

Hauser & Wirth is delighted to present an exhibition of new work in bronze, fabric, rubber, drawing and printmaking by Louise Bourgeois. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth and can be seen alongside a major Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern.

Bourgeois’ new works express both fragility and anxiety, and ultimately optimism. As is typical of her art, they seek a reconciliation of opposites, of hard with soft, geometric with organic, enigma with familiarity, and trauma with restoration: ‘I am trying to seek a balance between the extremes that I feel. I want to be reasonable.’ A series of standing sculptures (all 2007) continue the processing of the contents of her wardrobe as raw materials, a practice begun by the artist in the mid-nineties. In these new works, Bourgeois has re-stitched, draped and stuffed her clothes to create abstract forms, which she has then cast in bronze and painted. The resulting works are reminiscent of her early personages of the 1940s and 1950s. Bourgeois sees the folds, knots and orifices of these bronzes as suggestive of maternal nurturing and warmth, yet the sculptures’ whiteness and extremes of shape are also unsettling.

Gouache paintings continue Bourgeois’ preoccupation with the relationships of family, with coupling, pregnancy and child rearing. In works such as The Good Mother, The Pregnant Mother and The Hysterical Mother (all 2007) red figures are depicted with pendulous breasts, swollen stomachs and split heads. Their emphatically sexual characteristics are reminiscent of sculptures Bourgeois made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which reduced the body of a limbless woman to her belly, breasts and neck.

Hauser & Wirth is also exhibiting Nothing to Remember (2004 – 2006), two 22 page portfolios of coloured images and text on top of hand-drawn music manuscript paper. It follows from an earlier book, Ode à l ‘Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), which Bourgeois made entirely out of fabric, using the linens and clothing remnants from her past. The words and images in Nothing to Remember are tentative and delicate, conveying the significance and fleetingness of memories.

Louise Bourgeois was born in France in 1911 and worked in America since 1938. She studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and for a time studied with Fernand Léger. Through 2008 and 2009, Bourgeois’ Tate Modern exhibition tours to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, LAMoCA, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Major solo exhibitions include MOMA, New York (1994), the inaugural Unilever commission at Tate Modern, London (2000), the Guggenheim Bilbao (2001), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002), Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003). Bourgeois participated in Documenta 9 in 1989 and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993.

Installation views

About the Artist

Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

Bourgeois’s work is inextricably entwined with her life and experiences: fathoming the depths of emotion and psychology across two- and three-dimensional planes of expression. ‘Art,’ as she once remarked in an interview, ‘is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma.’ Arising from distinct and highly individualized processes of conceptualization, Bourgeois's multiplicity of forms and materials enact a perpetual play: at once embedding and conjuring emotions, only to dispel and disperse their psychological grasp. Employing motifs, dramatic colors, dense skeins of thread, and vast variety of media, Bourgeois's distinctive symbolic code enmeshes the complexities of the human experience and individual introspection.

Rather than pursuing formalist concerns for their own sake, Bourgeois endeavored to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining a wide range of materials—variously, fabric, plaster, latex, marble and bronze—with an endless repertoire of found objects. Although her oeuvre traverses the realms of painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois remains best known for her work in sculpture.

Bourgeois’s early works include her distinct 'Personages' from the late 1940s and early 1950s; a series of free-standing sculptures which reference the human figure and various urban structures, including skyscrapers. The ‘Personages’ served as physical surrogates for the friends and family Bourgeois had left behind in France, while also highlighting an interest in architecture dating back to her childhood. Her installation of these sculptures as clustered ‘environments’ in 1949 and 1950 foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre’s rise to prominence.

Bourgeois’s work was included in the seminal exhibition ‘Eccentric Abstraction,’ curated by Lucy Lippard for New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Major breakthroughs on the international scene followed with The Museum of Modern Art in New York's 1982 retrospective of her work; Bourgeois's participation in Documenta IX in 1992; and her representation of the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 2001, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective of her works, which subsequently traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., cemented her legacy as a foremost grande dame of late Modernism.

Header image: Louise Bourgeois, ARCHED FIGURE, 1993 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Christopher Burke