Louise Bourgeois
Zeichnungen und Skulpturen

06.07. - 15.09.2002
kunsthaus-bregenz.at

fig.: portrait with spiderIV; Louise Bourgeois in ihrem Atelier vor "Spider IV", 1996 Louise Bourgeois

more culture >>>

Bourgeois gradually abandoned abstract, surrealist painting in favor of a form of sculpture oriented towards Giacometti and primitive sculpture. From the mid-forties on she began her "Personnages," wooden totem poles, which Bourgeois arranged into groups. More or less parallel to this project Louise Bourgeois also worked on the series "Femmes Maison," in which she, as the mother of three sons, addressed the theme of woman and household. The works in this series show female figures whose bodies have been partially replaced by houses. Here Bourgeois ponders the role of women in society, which has been determined by domesticity. In the fifties Bourgeois made abstract, geometric sculptures, taking certain aspects of the sculptural work of Brancusi a step further. Later she not only used wood, stone, and metal, but increasingly began employing non-traditional materials as well, e.g. latex, rubber, papier-mâché, plaster, or cement. In the early sixties she continued to elaborate the theme of the house with her labyrinthine bodies, the "Lairs." Parallel to these she also created "Soft Landscapes" out of latex and fabric, the contours of which are reminiscent of the topography of human bodies.
At the heart of Louise Bourgeois' oeuvre is the human being, its body, and its relationship to its fellow man. In this sense her works are almost obsessively autobiographical. Her traumatic childhood experiences, strongly influenced by the sexual relationship her father had with the family governess, play a major role here. All her work of the last fifty years, as Bourgeois put it in 1983, found its inspiration in her childhood.
With "Destruction of the Father" 1974 Louise Bourgeois staged a symbolic patricide. The installation in latex and red fabric resembles a landscape of round and phallic protrusions and derives from the artist's childhood fantasy about devouring her unfaithful father at the table.
From the mid-eighties on, Bourgeois continued to work through her childhood experiences with "Cells," large, accessible spaces separated from their environment by wire screens and furnished with found or designed objects. Along with furniture arrangements and mirrors the spatial installations also include mysterious objects, such as body fragments made of various materials, which among other things can be taken to represent the human body.
Closely related to the "Cells" and their recurring treatment of themes like fears, obsessions, and sexuality are the "Spiders," gigantic sculptures made of bronze and steel, which Bourgeois has been working on for the last few years.

Towards the end of the seventies Bourgeois received increased worldwide recognition, whereby the growing interest feminist art criticism took in Bourgeois' gender-specific themes sometimes led to a one-sided interpretation of her work. It wasn't until 1982, when Bourgeois was 70, that the New York Museum of Modern Art organized the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of her work, thus acknowledging her influence on postwar art.
Since then, thanks particularly to her participation in documenta 1992 and the Venice Biennial 1993, her work has received more and more international attention. Today Louise Bourgeois is considered one of the most important female contemporary artists. This year she will be represented for the second time at documenta, which starting the eighth of June will be presenting her series "The Insomnia Drawings."

Kunsthaus Bregenz pays tribute to the work of this nonagenarian artist with its show of twenty sculptures and more than one hundred drawings done between 1943-2002, most of which are being exhibited for the first time. In the ongoing dialogue between sculptures and drawings on all the floors of the Kunsthaus the exhibition offers a unique survey of the different creative periods of the artist and her key works.
In addition to a representative retrospective, more than fifty drawings completed from 2001-2002 and major sculptures of the last few years will give the visitor insight into Louise Bourgeois' current work.
As one walks through the exhibition, one's gaze wanders back and forth from the introspective and to some extent abstract drawings to the diverse manifestations of her sculptural work: painted wooden totem poles from the forties, sculptures from the sixties and seventies in which Bourgeois makes a clear reference to the human body, hermaphroditic beings made of bronze and suspended from above, or her accessible environments from the eighties and nineties.
Two of her "Spiders," recent sculptures which the artist has fashioned in various forms over the last few years, have been placed at the beginning and the end of the exhibition. In the foyer the visitor wanders under or past a huge bronze spider whose legs span an area of 7 x 7 meters and whose torso looms three meters above visitor's heads. Thus In Bourgeois' work the recurring leitmotif of ambivalence of protection and vulnerability, temptation and threat, power and frailty, is made strikingly perceptible both physically and psychologically through this monumental sculpture located at the entrance of the exhibition.
The spider represents for Bourgeois a protective mother figure poised ready to defend her young. "My best friend was my mother, and she was ... (as) clever, patient, and neat as a spider; she could also defend herself."
On the third floor of the Kunsthaus, as it were, a bronze spider watches over one of several "Cells" on display in Bregenz which together represent a series stemming from the mid-eighties. With "Cells" Bourgeois creates spaces of memory not subject merely to biographical but also to collective interpretation. They call to mind not only protective hiding places but claustrophobic spaces as well. The strongly emotional quality of the installation gives rise to sensations of vulnerability and (sexual) aggression, mourning and isolation. The objects in the "Cells" - props the artist experiments with repeatedly - are each assigned new meanings.
The principle of repetition, of variation, and of permanent revision can also be found in Bourgeois' drawings. She describes the role of her drawings and her relationship to 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."
Even if the artist regards her drawings as subordinate to her sculptural work, they are still more than mere preliminary sketches. Bourgeois' drawings unfold often as an impulsive application of strokes that - based on a framework of lines and coordinates - evolve into configurations, which often reveal unexpected references of a motif field to
other elements.
Rendered predominantly in colored ink and charcoal but also in pencil, gouache, and other materials on paper, most of her figurative and abstract drawings are independent creations from which often emerge lightness, spontaneity, and humor, aspects that despite strong parallels in form and subject matter are not dominant in her major sculptures.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue (German/English) that includes texts by Scott Lyon-Wall and Eckhard Schneider, illustrations of all the works shown in Bregenz, a generously illustrated and annotated biography, as well as a comprehensive bibliography; edited by Eckhard Schneider, Kunsthaus Bregenz 2002, 256 pages.