LOUISE BOURGEOIS Recent works
Photo: Peter Bellamy
Louise Bourgeois is a unique artist in every respect. Now 86 years
old, she untiringly renews her mode of expression, and investigates and
mines increasingly deeper layers of her unconscious. She is today one of
the most interesting and sought-after contemporary artists.
Louise Bourgeois's art is characterized by certain recurring themes:
home, childhood, the past, motherhood, and sexuality. She connects all these
themes to eroticism and death, something which is becoming increasingly
evident in her work.
Louise Bourgeois's exhibition at MalmO Konsthall comprises work
from the last five years, where certain themes repeatedly form clusters
around her confrontation with her childhood and her parents, and where she
consistently works with textiles. One cluster of work includes Poles,
first shown at the 1996 Sao Paolo Biennial. These installations are
made from her own clothes, or sewn into different cloth assemblages. Red
Rooms belongs to a second group; the parents' room, the nursery. Here
she collects and mixes different hand-embroidered pieces of fabric, threads,
and spools. These works were begun in 1994. The use of textiles then led
to the various Spiders, which first took the form of drawings and
then later as monumental sculptures. The third group is explored and expressed
through distorted figures, shown either alone or in pairs.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and has lived in the
United States since 1938. She has been well-known in the U.S. for
a long time but her international break only came in the 80s. She is now
represented in most important collections of contemporary art. Her most
recent major retrospective was at the Musee' d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1995.
The exhibition at Malmo Konsthall, which presents some twenty major works,
offers a unique opportunity to see Louise Bourgeois's new works in her first
large-scale exhibition in the Nordic countries. |