Louise Bourgeois

Neue Arbeiten / Recent Works

15 January - 12 March 2000

Zürich

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911), the grande dame of late Modernism, lives and works in New York. Raised in Paris, she studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before moving to the USA with her husband in 1938. This relocation also marked the beginning of her artistic career. Despite immense productivity in the early post-war period, it was only in 1966 with the Eccentric Abstraction exhibition at New York’s Fischbach Gallery, curated by Lucy Lippard, that she first experienced more widespread recognition. Breakthroughs on the international scene came with the 1982 retrospective of her work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and her participation in documenta IX (1992) as well as at the 1993 Venice Biennial.

In contrast to the Red Room exhibition in 1996/97, which featured the installation of the same name and associated drawings, this time Galerie Hauser & Wirth is showing primarily drawings and watercolors from recent years as well as several of her latest smaller sculptures.

In the course of her work as an artist, Louise Bourgeois has grappled with a wide range of materials and techniques. In so doing, she has earned the status of a pioneer in several areas: for example, she is one of the first artists to have worked with installations by arranging her sculptures as interrelated components within a spatial context. Her enthusiasm for experimentation keeps leading her to new ways to treat and combine materials. For instance, in several of the sculptural fabric figures produced since the mid-1990s, constructed garments from childhood and youth serve as both substantive fullness and wrapping. They are material and theme, content and form.

With the new relief works, almost all of which were produced over the past year, Louise Bourgeois has expanded the possibilities of sculptural design. The smooth surface in pieces such as with 'Repairs in the Sky' is punctured with crater-like openings. These apertures, offering potential glimpses of what lies concealed behind, are re-sealed with fine threads or obscured by the application of fabric. It is exactly this combination of the soft lead with the thread and pieces of fabric that on one hand gives the relief fragility and ‘vulnerability‘ – the metal is pierced and hemmed-in – but on the other hand also intensifies the tension and compactness of the rectilinear pictorial space.

Executed on a variety of papers, the drawings and watercolors are partially overlaid with ornamental patterns. For the artist, the abstract forms are associated with feelings and moods. They are useful for the continual examination of the self, similar to an étude when playing a musical instrument. Although Louise Bourgeois herself gives priority to her sculptures and installations, her graphic work constitutes something of a second, equally valid language.

Louise Bourgeois works with inexhaustible creativity on an oeuvre whose ability to impress is founded most of all in the coherence of its content. With the new pieces, she continues to confront the formative motifs of her work: themes of past experience and memory, fear and hurt, sexuality and the body.

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

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