LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Born 1911 in Paris, France. Died 2010 New York, USA.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and moved to New York in 1938, where she continues to live and work. For over 60 years Bourgeois has made sculptures, drawings, paintings and prints that deal with personal memory, emotion and the body. Drawing from her childhood in provincial France and her relationship with her parents in many of her works, Bourgeois’ sense of the emotional resonance of material and form has led to her standing as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Her career has been marked by many achievements: in 1982, she was the first woman to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; she received the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999; in 2000, she was the first person to have a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern, London; and she was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal in 2008.

Following early works of the 1940s such as the hybrid woman/ house ‘Femme Maison’ paintings and abstract wooden ‘Personages’ sculptures that represented people from the artist’s former life in France, Bourgeois has gone on to develop a strong visual vocabulary of ambiguous, biomorphic and sexually suggestive forms. Using materials such as latex, plaster and pink marble, her amorphous, organic, bulging and creviced sculptures favour the emotional and physical states of life, and attest to the ability of art to confront complex psychological states, and even become a means of healing trauma. First made in the 1980s, Bourgeois’ Cells are large sculptural installations that play on dual ideas of imprisonment and the comfort of enclosure. Taking the form of circular or cube-like cages or rooms, these symbolically rich environments are repositories of memory and experience, filled with disparate objects such as figurative sculptures, old clothes, furniture, household items, perfume bottles, wasps’ nests and personal memorabilia. Cell (Glass, spheres and hands) (1990–93) is inhabited with glass bubbles that sit atop roughly made chairs. Their contained, spherical form implies alienation and a denial of communication, while their fragility and close placement together suggests a frustrated but silent communion. On an adjacent table, a pair of marble hands is clasped in despair at this tableau of attempted exchange. An overall impression of vulnerability marks what could be a prison of the past but also an attempt to understand its intricacies and put them in some kind of order.

ECHO (2007) continues the artist’s practice of creating sculptures from fabric and items in her wardrobe. A suite of seven sculptures made from bronze that has been painted white, the works are casts of Bourgeois’ clothes that have been draped, stretched and sewn together. Alternately slender or slumped with bulbous folds and creases, they bring to mind her early totem-like sculptures of the 1940s and 1950s, while representing maternal feelings of nurturing and warmth stemming from the important influence of Bourgeois’ mother. Here, as in many of her works, bodies are represented by both analogy and absence – the disembodied clothes of ECHO swell with hints of corporeal parts: the turned-out pocket lifting off the line of seamed fabric like a strange, sexual flower, and the upright, phallic stretch of disembodied sleeves. Together they become a forest of domestic allusions and remains that, in their estranged familiarity and human scale, make us very much aware of our own bodies.

Drawing has been a constant part of Bourgeois’ practice, marked by its speed and immediacy of expression. THE COUPLE (2007), a series of 18 bright red gouache drawings on paper, depict stylised and ambiguous couplings, with figures that smudge and bleed into each other in an arresting visual metaphor for the blurred lines between self and other in the struggles for an intimate and sustained relationship.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2007–08 ‘Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective’, Tate Modern, London, England (travelling exhibition)
2008–09 ‘Louise Bourgeois for Capodimonte’, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy
2001–02 ‘Louise Bourgeois at the Hermitage’, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (travelling exhibition)
1989–90 ‘Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective Exhibition’, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, West Germany (travelling exhibition)
1982–83 ‘Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, usa (travelling exhibition)

Selected Group Exhibitions

2007–09 ‘Picasso and American Art’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (travelling exhibition)
2008 ‘Traces of Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love’, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Bangkok, Thailand
2007–08 ‘Un Cos Sense Limits/Un Corps Inattendu’, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain 2007 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
2006 ‘Part Object Part Sculpture’, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Selected Bibliography

Jacqueline Caux, Tissée, Tendue au Fil des Jours, La Toile de Louise Bourgeois, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2003
Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells, Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 2008
Frances Morris, with essays by P. Herkenhoff, J. Kristeva, D. Kuspit, E. Lebovici, M. Nixon, L. Nochlin, A. Potts, R. Storr et al., Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing London, 2007
Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, MIT Press, London, 2005
R. Storr, P. Herkenhoff and A. Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon Press, London, 2003