LOUISE BOURGEOIS   Drawings and Sculpture     06 I 07 I 02 - 15 I 09 I 2002      
   
   
    Cell XXV (The View of the
World of the jealous Wife), 2002
Photo: Christopher Burke 		 
       
    Louise Bourgeois, presently one of the pre-eminent American artists, was born in Paris in 1911. At the age of one her family moved to Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb of Paris, where they ran an atelier restoring and selling Renaissance and Medieval tapestries. In 1932, at the age of twenty-one, she returned to Paris and studied calculus and geometry at the Sorbonne briefly before graduating with a Baccalauréate in Philosophy from the University of Paris. When Louise became disillusioned by the turn toward abstraction in mathematics she began exploring the art schools and studios of Paris. In this period she came in contact with Matisse, Picasso, Andre Breton among others. But it was in 1938, while studying with Fernand Léger, that her ultimate vocation as an artist became clear. He noted the three-dimensional quality of her paintings and drawings, which prompted her to work in sculpture from that point on. That same year she met the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City where she has lived ever since.    
         
         
Untitled, 1996
303 x 208, 2 x 195,5 cm
Photo: Frederic Delpech
    "The Dagger Child hurt the Parent", 1998
29,2 x 22,8 cm
Photo: Volker Naumann
   
             
  In the 1940s she and her husband befriended the many celebrated artists, gallery owners, and art historians who were in New York at the time (e.g., Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim and Alfred Barr.) Her first solo exhibition of paintings was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1945. This exhibition was followed by a series of paintings entitled "Femmes Maison" (1945-1947). In these the female figure is abstracted, carrying a house instead of a head, symbolizing Bourgeois' fear and discomfort with the role of woman as defined by the metaphor of the house. In the early sixties she continued to elaborate the theme of the house with the "Lairs", a series of labyrinthine spaces.
Bourgeois gradually abandoned painting in favor of carving in wood. In the mid to late 40s she produced monolithic and segmented wood pieces called "personnages". Moving away from the carved monolithic form, Bourgeois employed segmented elements threaded on a rod in order to create an abstract, geometric presence akin to certain aspects of the work of Brancusi while introducing a sense of repetition and movement.

Eventually she abandoned the rigidity of wood and began exploring plaster, latex, rubber, cement, and marble. At the same time she began to make a series of "Soft Landscapes". The contours of these abstract pieces suggested the topography of human bodies.
It was in the 1970s, when her interest in organic shapes and corporeal sculpture meshed with the psychological and organic processes then being explored by such artists as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman, that Bourgeois' work began to receive attention for its feminist content. By then her art had become a form of catharsis and psychological investigation where mythology, abstraction, and personal symbolism were combined with such materials as wood, stone, latex, rubber, wax and bronze. Textile and objets trouvés also found their way into her installations and sculptures. The psychological was wedded with a return to geometric forms such as circles and spirals which are found in her Insomnia Drawings (1994-95). Bourgeois drew at night when unable to sleep developing sketches as a form of diary.
Bourgeois' oeuvre is an expression of the relationship of one person to another. She sees the process of making art as an act of exorcism. All of her work is obsessively autobiographical. Bourgeois herself has said that the work of the last fifty years has found its inspiration in her childhood. One extended traumatic incident in her childhood has had an enormous influence on her work. It is the ten-year sexual relationship her father had with the family governess. With her sculpture, "Destruction of the Father" (1974) Bourgeois staged a symbolic patricide. This theatrical cave-like installation in latex, fabric, and red colored light forms a landscape of round and phallic protrusions. Its theme derives from the artist's childhood fantasy of devouring her unfaithful father at the table.
Bourgeois' stature and influence in the art world changed considerably with her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was while preparing an illustrated slide show of her life for the exhibition she began to talk for the first time of the personal, quite traumatic, events of her childhood. Up until this point such personal content had been in the work but had not yet been articulated so openly by Bourgeois.
In the 1980s and 90s another important shift occurred when she began to work with installation producing her series of "Cells" and "Spiders". These extraordinary environments populated with intricate autobiographical detail, draw spectators into her intimate world where emotion and memory are translated into scenes of epic material expression.
The term "cell" refers both to the biological meaning of the word and to the psychological implications of imprisonment and enforced isolation. Along with furniture arrangements and mirrors, the spatial installations also include mysterious objects such as body fragments. In spite of the autobiographical nature of the series, the "Cells" are remarkably open to general interpretation. They create a space of memory that is not only Louise Bourgeois' but collective as well. The "Cells" are spaces of emotional opposites: protective and claustrophobic; vulnerable and charged with (sexual) aggression; heavy with a sense of mourning and isolation while comforting and full of life.
In 1994 Bourgeois made the first of a series of gigantic spiders in bronze and steel, which culminated in the "Spider Cell" of 1997. The spider is a metaphor for Bourgeois' protective mother. "My best friend was my mother, and she was... (as) clever, patient, and neat as a spider; she could also defend herself." In the "Spider Cell" Bourgeois transformed the spider from a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional place one enters physically.

From the 1990s to the present Bourgeois has participated in many international exhibitions, including documenta IX in 1992, and in 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennial. This summer she will participate for the second time at documenta presenting her series "The Insomnia Drawings" and four recent fabric "Cells".

Independent of her sculptural output is Bourgeois' prodigious production of drawings. The principles of repetition, variation, and permanent revision can also be found here. She describes the relationship between her drawings and sculpture as follows: "Drawings are irreplaceable because when ideas come, you have to catch them like flies (...) and what do you do with flies and butterflies? You preserve them and use them (...), thus a drawing becomes a painting and a painting becomes a sculpture. To me sculptures are all that free me. They are tangible reality. Real people are perhaps the only thing better than sculptures".

Rendered predominantly in colored ink and charcoal but also in pencil, gouache, and other materials on paper, her figurative and abstract drawings are independent creations from the sculpture. They represent an entirely different mood of lightness, spontaneity, and humor -aspects that, despite strong parallels in form and subject matter - are not dominant in her major sculptures.

The Kunsthaus Bregenz is pleased to pay tribute to the work of this nonagenarian artist with its show of twenty sculptures and survey of more than one hundred drawings done between 1943-2002, as well as new works never before exhibited. We have chosen to place one of the great "Spiders" at the beginning of the exhibition and one at the end. In this way the visitor wanders under or past a huge bronze spider whose legs span an area of seven times seven meters and whose torso looms three meters above the visitor's heads. Thus the recurring leitmotifs of protection and vulnerability, passivity and aggression, power and frailty, physicality and the psychological -pairs which permeate all of Louise Bourgeois' work - are experienced directly by the visitor.

A catalogue in German and English has been produced for the show. It includes texts by Scott Lyon-Wall and Eckhard Schneider as well as illustrations of all the works shown in Bregenz. A generously illustrated, annotated biography and comprehensive bibliography are also included. The catalogue is edited by Eckhard Schneider of the Kunsthaus Bregenz and is 256 pages (€ 58,-)

    
     
     
     




     
           
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