My Own Voice Wakes Me Up
26 March - 11 May 2019
Hong Kong
Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of works by renowned French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010). Opening on 26 March and on view through 11 May 2019, the exhibition is curated by Jerry Gorovoy, who worked closely with Bourgeois from the early 1980s until her death in 2010.
For more than 70 years, Bourgeois created forms that merged the concrete reality of the world around her and the fantastic reality of her inner psychic landscape. Her creative process was rooted in an existential need to record the rhythms and fluctuations of her conscious and unconscious life as a way of imposing order on the chaos of her emotions. The body, with its functions and distempers, held the key to both self-knowledge and cathartic release. ‘My Own Voice Wakes Me Up’ takes its title from one of Bourgeois’s ‘psychoanalytic writings,’ dated December 1951 and written at the very beginning of her intensive analysis. In this text, she describes how her own voice awakes her from a dream in which she was calling out (‘maman, maman’) while pounding on her husband’s chest. The exhibition focuses on distinct bodies of work from the final two decades of the artist’s life, including fabric sculptures, hand poses, late works on paper, topiary sculptures, and rarely exhibited holograms.
Entering the gallery on the 16th floor, visitors are confronted with a selection of Bourgeois’s Topiary works. The pink marble and patinated bronze figures are images of transformation, sprouting coniferous heads and foliage. These surreal forms personify the natural world, and attest to Bourgeois’s interest in nature as expressed through human and emotional terms. ‘Topiary,’ the art of clipping and training plants, represents an intervention on natural growth. The cutting and healing process often serves to strengthen a plant, a process that appealed to Bourgeois.
A separate room on the 16th floor is devoted to Bourgeois’s little-known and rarely exhibited Holograms. In 1998, Bourgeois was approached by C-Project, a New York-based fine arts holographic studio dedicated to exploring the creative potential of three-dimensional photographs in collaboration with painters and sculptors. Within these self-contained universes, Bourgeois pieced together a cast of motley, emotionally resonate entities that combine the incipient dread and satirical playfulness that marks much of her work. The holographic image is created by
laser beams that record the light field reflected from an object, burning it onto a plate of glass. The image is scaled at a one-to-one correspondence with the original material, so that peering at these works conveys the sensation of looking at Bourgeois’s actual assemblage, but at an eerie remove.
Moving through the gallery to the 15th floor, viewers encounter a bronze hand sculpture titled ‘Nature Study,’ a selection of Hand and Head sculptures created both in fabric and in marble, as well as her late experimental works on paper. In the sculpture ‘Nature Study,’ a tightly coiled spiral morphs into a hand holding a female figure. The slender fingers suggest a woman’s hand, and the gentle way it cradles the small figure conveys maternal nurturing. The hand appears to emerge from inside the coil, as though presenting the figure to the outside world. This composition is evocative of birth – or perhaps re-birth – given the post-pubescent body of the figure. Louise Bourgeois first used the spiral form in the 1950s, and it appears often in later works. For her, the spiral represented ‘an attempt at controlling the chaos.’ The work’s title, ‘Nature Study,’ lends itself to the idea of a natural order or cycle of life, while the tightly spiraled form is suggestive of the knotted and intertwined nature of familial relationships.
Throughout her career, Louise Bourgeois experimented with various methods of representing the body, often presenting it in fragments. Hands are common motifs in her production. Though she began working with marble in the 1960s, her later marble works, begun in the 80s, often feature roughly finished blocks from which exquisitely carved figurative elements seamlessly grow. Evoking memories of a childhood spent working at the Bourgeois family’s tapestry restoration workshop, the artist interweaves fingers as though they were threads; their warp and weft knit together in a lattice of psychological and physical support.
Bourgeois was not concerned with traditional portraiture or an image of any one individual, but instead with the effect that the individual can have on another, and the emotional dynamic played out by the encounter with the other. With her fabric heads, she explores a range of psychological expressions and complex emotional states – love, sexuality, suffering, and death – through the heads’ features and the ways in which they have been constructed and sewn. The maternal, feminine, and familial aspects of fabric provide a sense of tenderness. With these deeply intimate forms, Bourgeois revealed many facets of the human experience, and conceived a beautifully haunting language that extends far beyond her life.
A selection of Bourgeois’s late works on paper will also be on display, including red gouaches and multi-paneled works on paper. In the latter, different states of etching forms the armature for a loosely gestured layering of watercolor, gouache, ink, pencil, and hand-applied fabric. For Bourgeois, colors were symbolic of distinct emotional states, and could be deployed to communicate in profound and subliminal ways. Red represented ‘the intensity of the emotions involved,’ and was often synonymous with pain. She also equated it with blood, violence, danger, shame, jealousy, and depression. In one of her many writings she stated, ‘Depth of depression is measured by your attraction to red.’
The exhibition coincides with Bourgeois’s first large-scale museum tour in China, ‘The Eternal Thread,’ organized in collaboration with the Louise Bourgeois Studio, and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith. The exhibition will travel from the Long Museum, Shanghai to the Song Art Museum, Beijing, opening on 23 March and on view through 23 June 2019.
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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