Louise Bourgeois @ Hauser & Wirth NYC - 'Gathering Wool' Exhibition

Louise Bourgeois. Gathering Wool 

Hauser & Wirth New York 

6 November 2025 – 24 January 2026 

Over the course of her seven-decade career, Louise Bourgeois never privileged figuration over abstraction, any more than she favored one material over another, and yet her relationship to abstraction has been less well defined and understood, less easily situated within the main currents of postwar art.

Gathering Wool, explores the artist's complex relationship to abstraction through a series of late sculptures, reliefs and works on paper, many of which have never been exhibited before. These are installed alongside a selection of earlier works to illuminate the consistency of Bourgeois’s themes and her development of a symbolic abstract language. 

The exhibition takes its title from an enigmatic work Louise Bourgeois created in 1990. Gathering wool is an expression signifying rumination, daydreaming, letting the mind wander—a break from conscious, purposive thinking. This was the mental state in which Bourgeois worked as she experimented with forms and processes in her studio. She trusted the process by which these thought traces, fragments of dreams, idle speculations, hunches, fancies and intuitions coalesced into a form, but it remained mysterious even to her. The piece itself consists of seven wooden spheres arranged in a circle in front of a tall semicircular screen made up of four panels. ‘Gathering Wool’ (1990) is a precursor of her celebrated Cells in that it is both a sculpture and an environmental installation.

The exhibition begins on the first floor with the large installation ‘Twosome,’ (1991) in which a small tank on a track moves endlessly in and out of a larger tank. For Louise Bourgeois, this mechanism represented the mother-child relationship. The same gallery also features a video clip from her 1978 performance ‘A Fashion Show of Body Parts,’ in which the actress Suzan Cooper belts out the song, ‘She Abandoned Me,’ which addresses the fear of separation from the mother. This juxtaposition of works manifests how the same psychologically charged emotions which gave rise to Bourgeois’s more figurative works also underpin the formal devices in her more abstract works.

An iconography of things protruding out of other things prevails in many works on the ground floor. In ‘Untitled (With Hand)’ (1989) a child-like arm protrudes from a large sphere, in ‘Mamelles’ (1991) water spills from a long frieze of bronze breasts, in ‘Gathering Wool’ (1990) mushrooms grow out of the cracks and crevasses of the wooden spheres, and in ‘Le Défi II’ (1992) light emanates from glass elements meticulously arranged on the shelves of a metal cabinet. These works probe the boundary and the slippage between container and contained, past and present, the conscious realm with its rationality and order and the timelessness of the unconscious.

On the fifth floor, the works are predominantly abstract, consisting of vertical progressions and stacked forms. For Louise Bourgeois, stacking was an ordering action that attempted to impose regularity and predictability on the chaos of her emotions. Each formal device she deployed corresponded to an emotional or psychological state or impulse. Thus, the repetition and stacking of like elements signify obsession and compulsion. The precarious balance of top-heavy forms indicates fragility and instability. Interlocking forms are safeguards against the fear of abandonment that dogged Bourgeois throughout her life. Triangular forms are expressions of jealousy. The pathological roots of Bourgeois’s art generated a vocabulary of eccentric abstract forms. As the artist once wrote, ‘I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

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 our time. 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.

HAUSER & WIRTH 

542 West 22nd Street New York 10011

www.hauserwirth.com

Louise Bourgeois @ Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong - ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ - Exhibition Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith

Louise Bourgeois: Soft Landscape

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

25 March – 21 June 2025

Widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the past century, French-American artist LOUISE BOURGEOIS’s work expresses a variety of emotions through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents, ranging from intimate drawings to large-scale installations. ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ explores the dynamic relationship between landscape and the human body in Bourgeois’s work. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, this is her second show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, and coincides with the ongoing tour of a major survey exhibition organized by the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which is on view at the Fubon Art Museum, Taipei, since 15 March through 30 June 2025.

Consisting of a selection of works from the 1960s up until her death in 2010, ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ sets up a series of four interlocking dialogues that revolve around an iconography of nests, holes, cavities, mounds, breasts, spirals, snakes and water. This imagery corresponds to the themes and preoccupations that Louise Bourgeois explored over the course of her career: the good mother, fecundity and growth, retreat and protection, vulnerability and dependency, and the passage of time. Her forms are expressed using such diverse materials as bronze, rubber, lead, aluminium, wood and marble. The exhibition foregrounds certain formal devices developed by Louise Bourgeois, such as the hanging form, the spiral and the relief. As always in her work, there is an oscillation between abstraction and figuration. 

On view throughout the exhibition space are works from Bourgeois’s Lair series, first created by the artist in the early 1960s as she emerged from a deep depression and a long immersion in psychoanalysis, which all but replaced her artmaking for the better part of a decade. The Lair sculptures are protective places of retreat, like a home, and convey a mood of interiority, introspection and withdrawal. 

Making its debut in Asia, the sculpture ‘Spider’ (2000) was loosely inspired by an ostrich egg given to the artist. The large scale of the egg, relative to the spider that it contains, expresses the burdensome responsibilities of motherhood. Bourgeois’s iconic spiders were conceived as an ode to her mother, yet the spider is also a self-portrait; Bourgeois felt that her art came directly from her body, just as a spider spins its own web. 

A number of works that have never been exhibited before are on view in this exhibition. In one gallery, four wall reliefs of painted wood merge landscape and biomorphic form. Louise Bourgeois fashioned these reliefs out of the interiors of old crates once used to transport her Personage sculptures. The way she put these wooden pieces together created a central opening that she would sometimes populate with internal elements. The metal frames that house these reliefs serve to make them feel more sculptural and object-like. This series of painted landscape reliefs is complemented by a long horizontal scratchboard landscape. Here the mark making is achieved through patiently scratching the dark-painted surface to make a delicate white line. The resulting image is a portrait of isolation, of a world without other people. 

Also exhibited for the first time is the bronze fountain ‘Mamelles’ (1991 [cast 2005]), which consists of a long frieze of multiple breast-like forms, with water spilling from five of the nipples into a basin below. Bourgeois – who liked seeing how different materials could alter the meaning of her forms – also realized this sculpture in marble and pink rubber. The endless flow and splashing of the water symbolize the passage of time, but it also represents the good mother who provides nourishment for her children.

A pair of late works on paper similarly express the passage of time through flowing calligraphic gestures on music paper that hover between an abstracted landscape and wave-like forms. 

‘Time’ (2004) belongs to a series of suites of double-sided drawings which Louise Bourgeois made in 2003-04. The repetitive mark-making has a meditative quality, and perhaps exerted a calming effect on the artist. The richness emerges in the slight inflections and differences in line and texture among the sheets (there is an affinity to weaving), and the occasional appearance of words, names and phrases that seem to surface from the unconscious. ‘Time’ (2004) has a diaristic quality, as if the artist’s pen were an instrument for registering the most minute shifts in the artist’s thought and mood. 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (b. Paris, 1911, d. New York, 2010) is one of the most influential artists of the past century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career—including performance, painting, and printmaking—she is best known as a sculptor. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, and ranging from intimate drawings to large-scale installations, Bourgeois expressed a variety of emotions through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents. Raised in Paris and its suburbs, she was involved in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop and gallery from a young age. Complex relationships with her disloyal father and chronically ill mother led to pervasive feelings of guilt, jealousy, betrayal, and abandonment. These themes, countered with love and reparation, form the core of her work. She often stated that the creative process was a form of exorcism: a way of reconstructing memories and emotions in order to free herself from their grasp.

HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

G/F, 8 Queen's Road Central, Central, Hong Kong

www.hauserwirth.com

Exposition Louise Bourgeois @ Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris - "I do, I undo, I redo"

Louise Bourgeois

I do, I undo, I redo

Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris

14 mars – 30 avril 2024 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Sainte Sébastienne, 1992

Gravure, 50 ex. 120.5 x 94.3 cm

© Louise Bourgeois / Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Henriette, 1998

Lithographie et montage, 50 exemplaires 

Lithograph and montage, edition of 50

118 x 80 cm

© Louise Bourgeois / Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Ainu tree, 2000

Lithographie, 100 exemplaires 

Lithograph, edition of 100

74 x 51 cm

© Louise Bourgeois / Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co

Tissé de nombreux éléments autobiographiques, l’oeuvre de Louise Bourgeois témoigne d’un corps à corps entre le souvenir et la mémoire qui oscille, s’étiole, se distend.

La sculptrice, qui disait "la peinture n’existe pas pour moi", a néanmoins toujours été fortement atachée à l’image gravée ou dessinée. Elle consignait dans ses journaux intimes les idées visuelles qui lui apparaissaient et qu’elle attrapait comme des mouches en plein vol, selon ses propres mots.

Comme ses sculptures aux matières informes et organiques, son oeuvre gravé explore l’ambiguïté des formes de ses souvenirs fantasmés.

Ainsi, Louise Bourgeois collecte, dépèce, déconstruit, modèle et assemble.

Ce jeu fait d’allers et retours, propice à l’activité du graveur, se retrouve nottamment dans la "Sainte Sébastienne", relecture féminine de la figure du célèbre martyr transpercé de flèches. En 1990, Bourgeois en a commencé la première version et reviendra dessus plusieurs fois en recadrant l’image, utilisant même la photocopie pour développer sa composition et/ou à la transférer sur la plaque de cuivre.

Née en France en 1911 et décédée en 2010, Louise Bourgeois est une des artistes majeures de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle et du début du XXIe. Découverte tardivement, son oeuvre, qui échappe à toute classification artistique a fait l’objet de grandes expositions et rétrospectives à travers le monde ces 30 dernières années. Son oeuvre a été présenté pour la première fois en France en 1985, par la galerie Lelong.

La Galerie Lelong & Co. a publié en 2000 un volume d’écrits et entretiens de Louise Bourgeois sous le titre : "Destruction du père / Reconstruction du père".

GALERIE LELONG & CO.

13 rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris (Librairie)

www.galerie-lelong.com

Louise Bourgeois @ Hauser & Wirth Somerset - Drawing Intimacy 1939 – 2010

Louise Bourgeois 

Drawing Intimacy 1939 – 2010 

Hauser & Wirth Somerset 

1 October 2022 – 2 January 2023 

 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911–2010) is one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. ‘Drawing Intimacy 1939 – 2010’ shares with the viewer an extraordinary grouping of works from the artist’s private collection. Exhibited publicly for the first time, the paintings, sculpture and works on paper reflect Louise Bourgeois’s multiplicity of mind and material.  Her exploration of self lives within the dreamscape of touch and expression shared in this exhibition. Embodiment as transient sublimation

‘Louise Bourgeois. Drawing Intimacy 1939 – 2010’ forms a collection of highly personal memories and ideas that in turn reflect the complexity and intimacy of Louise Bourgeois’s practice. The works presented span the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre, from a selection of plaster sculptures to previously unseen paintings, drawings and works on paper. Most of the works on paper were made during the last four years of Louise Bourgeois’s life, and often feature words or phrases which evoke associations and memories. The interaction of image and text crystallizes the interplay of past and present.

The exhibition is curated by Benjamin Shiff, who played a major role in the re-emergence of printmaking in Louise Bourgeois’s practice in the late 1980s, and who remained an important force in her creative use of the medium up until her last years. Unfolding across two galleries in Somerset, ‘Drawing Intimacy 1939 – 2010’ highlights the sensitivity and strength of Bourgeois’s artistic vision: ‘It is not an image I am seeking. It is not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving and of destroying.’ 

This autumn, ‘Louise Bourgeois. Paintings’ traveled from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York to the New Orleans Museum of Art, showing until 1 January 2023. ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child’, previously on view at The Hayward Gallery, London, runs at the Gropius Bau, Berlin until 23 October 2022. 

HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET

Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane

Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL

www.hauserwirth.com

______________

Louise Bourgeois @ Hayward Gallery, London - The Woven Child

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child

Hayward Gallery, London

Through 15 May 2022

The Hayward Gallery presents Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, the first major retrospective of this legendary artist to focus exclusively on the works that she made with fabrics and textiles during the final chapter of her storied career. These works, many of which have never been shown before in the UK, comprise one of the greatest late career chapters in the history of art.

The exhibition focuses on the mid-1990s until Louise Bourgeois’s death in 2010; a period during which the artist forged a body of work that re-articulated many of her lifelong concerns in newly provocative and profoundly enlivening ways, including her exploration of identity, sexuality, family relationships, reparation, and memory. In surveying this late body of work, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child explores what the artist, in her own words, called ‘the magic power of the needle … to repair the damage’ and to offer ‘a claim to forgiveness’.

Louise Bourgeois created an astonishingly inventive, and psychologically charged, range of sculptures using domestic textiles, including clothing, linens and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history. This departure from traditional sculptural materials represented a return to Louise Bourgeois’s roots; her connection to fabric began in her childhood, during which she helped in her family’s tapestry restoration atelier in France. Louise Bourgeois’s decision to create artworks from her clothes and household textiles was thus a means of transforming, as well as preserving, the past. She viewed the actions involved in fabricating these works – cutting, ripping, sewing, joining – in psychological and metaphorical terms, relating them to notions of reparation and to the trauma of separation or abandonment.

Featuring around 90 works, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child surveys the complete range of fabric artworks that Louise Bourgeois produced during her last two decades. The exhibition includes major installations, notably several of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental Cells, in which hanging configurations of old dresses, slips, and nightwear directly reference her personal history. The imposing installation Spider (1997), and the related Cell piece, Lady in Waiting (2003), incorporate fragments of antique tapestry. Louise Bourgeois understood the spider as both protector and predator, and associated it with her mother, a weaver and tapestry restorer. Its ability to weave a web from its own body was a metaphor that Bourgeois also used to describe her artistic process and is a particularly poignant image within this survey of her fabric work.

The exhibition includes a comprehensive range of figurative sculptures, many of which are missing limbs and heads or feature fantastical bodies that call to mind characters from unsettling fairy tales. Presented in vitrines, suspended from the ceiling, or displayed on plinths, Louise Bourgeois’s fabric figures – which largely portray female bodies – pointedly conjure states of abjection, abandonment, or entrapment. A significant selection of the artist's fabric heads are also showcased, revealing the wide range of expressions that she elaborated in these uncanny and impactful portraits. Also featured is a selection of Louise Bourgeois’s ‘progressions’: columns of stacked textile blocks or lozenges, organised in ascending and descending sequences. With these works, Louise Bourgeois returned to the vertical sculptural forms that dominated her early work in the 1940s and ‘50s, only now rendered in soft materials. Louise Bourgeois regularly revisited and revised motifs from earlier works throughout her career, a practice that reached a climax with a group of four major late works, made during the last five years of her life, in which combinations of different types of sculptures are displayed together in large vitrines. Collectively, they constitute a kind of summary statement of her late fabric art.

In addition to sculpture, the exhibition highlights a wide selection of Louise Bourgeois’s vibrant fabric drawings, books, prints and collages, including collages which feature large-scale clock faces that she produced during the final year of her life.

Philip Larratt-Smith, Curator at The Easton Foundation says: “Louise Bourgeois’s fabric work is a remarkable and unexpected final act. There is no falling off in the fertility of her imagination, no slackening of the impulses behind her astonishing range of formal invention. Taken as a whole, the fabric work is both a summing up and a recalibration of the forms, processes, motifs, and ideas that obsessed Bourgeois over a lifetime.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director at the Hayward Gallery, says: “We are thrilled to present this major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’s rich and utterly compelling works made with textiles. While touching on many themes central to her earlier works, Louise Bourgeois’s carefully considered use of varied fabrics, including time-worn materials, imbues her late sculptures with a striking sense of intimacy, vulnerability and mortality. Over a decade after the artist’s death, these works continue to challenge us with questions that seem more compelling and urgent than ever.”

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff, with Assistant Curator Katie Guggenheim and Curatorial Assistant Marie-Charlotte Carrier.

The exhibition will tour to Gropius Bau, Berlin from 22 July to 23 October 2022.

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child Catalogue

Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing and Hatje Cantz

Paperback (full flaps), 208 pages, 280 x 240 mm 

136 colour illustrations

ISBN: 978-3-7757-5149-0

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with newly commissioned essays by curator and scholar Lynne Cooke, novelist Rachel Cusk, curator Julienne-Franziska Lorz, and Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff. 

THE HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Louise Bourgeois @ The Jewish Museum, NYC - Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

The Jewish Museum, New York

Through September 12, 2021 

The Jewish Museum presents Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, an exhibition that explores Bourgeois’s complex and ambivalent relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition showcases a selection of Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings — many of them presented to the public for the first time — along with nearly 50 works from throughout her career, including the Personages of the late 1940s; the organic forms in plaster and latex of the 1960s; the pivotal installation The Destruction of the Father (1974); Passage Dangereux (1997), the largest of the artist’s Cell installations; and the fabric sculptures from the last 15 years of her life. 

“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses. They do not explain or demystify her art, but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.” -- Philip Larratt-Smith

In the late 1940s, Louise Bourgeois struggled to balance her ambitions as a creative artist and her obligations as a mother and wife, and suffered from a host of physical and psychological ailments, such as insomnia, agoraphobia, compulsive thoughts, and aggressive and suicidal impulses. She was already in a fragile state when her father’s death in 1951 plunged her into a deep depression. In early 1952 she entered analysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a former disciple of Freud and, like Louise Bourgeois, an emigré from Europe. Her analysis would continue for the next 33 years, most intensely from 1952 to 1966, and thereafter in an on-off fashion until Lowenfeld’s death in 1985. Bourgeois also steeped herself in psychoanalytic literature, reading Freud, Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Hélène Deutsch, Marie Bonaparte, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and Wilhelm Stekel, among others. During the most intense phase of her immersion in analysis, Louise Bourgeois effectively withdrew from the art world: she had no solo shows from 1953 until 1964, and her art making came to an almost complete halt from 1955 to 1960. 

As part of the analytic process, Louise Bourgeois started writing down dream recordings, process notes, and other texts on loose sheets of paper, some of which she would share with Lowenfeld. This vast written record was discovered in the artist’s Chelsea home in 2004 and 2010. Its existence is somewhat at odds with the fact that Bourgeois distrusted words and did not believe in the talking cure. She always maintained that making art gave her access to her unconscious, and that her art required no verbal exegesis or defense. For as much as the writings shed light on the linkage between her psychic life and her forms, they do not explain her art any more than her art illustrates the writing. Instead they constitute a parallel body of work that at times took the place of her visual output. The function they fulfilled for Bourgeois was multiple: they were a tool for the analytic hour; they had a therapeutic value as a means of calming herself down and releasing anxiety; they gave her insight into the work she had already made, and more broadly into her forms, processes, and motivations; and they enabled her to define her emotions more precisely by fixing them in time. In literary quality and historical importance the psychoanalytic writings bear comparison with the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the journals of Eugène Delacroix, and the letters of Vincent van Gogh; along with her diaries, they establish Bourgeois’s status as an artist-writer of the first rank. They represent an original contribution not only to the field of psychoanalysis—a discipline effectively cofounded by women—but also to that of feminism. They provide a unique perspective on such topics as symbol formation, the family romance, maternal and paternal identifications, mourning and melancholia, and sublimation. The psychoanalytic writings attest to the fact that for Bourgeois art making and psychoanalysis were not distinct activities but points on a single continuum, so that at times it is hard to define where one ends and the other begins. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter frames Louise Bourgeois’s engagement with psychoanalysis through the lens of the Oedipus complex, which is both the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis and the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. Bourgeois’s work is often told from the point of view of a young girl, and she often said that the artist did not go through the rites of passage. The psychoanalytic writings make plain the lingering hold this Oedipal deadlock exerted on Bourgeois, and in particular her eroticized and often anguished fixation on her father. This ambivalence would be replayed in her subsequent relationships with men, including Freud, whom Bourgeois never met but nonetheless internalized as a father figure. Bourgeois critiqued the father of psychoanalysis for his blind spots about female sexuality and for failing to understand the creative artist. Yet her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices—whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis—informed and enriched her art making. To call Bourgeois “Freud’s daughter” is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic sculptural output. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter is curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, Guest Curator, and coordinated by Shira Backer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, The Jewish Museum. 

Publication: A major publication co-published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition, featuring an introduction by Philip Larratt-Smith, an original essay by renowned psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, a full-color plate section of art works germane to the exhibition thesis, and selected facsimiles of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

By Philip Larratt-Smith; With an essay by Juliet Mitchell

Publication Date: May 25, 2021

Published by Yale University Press in association with

the Jewish Museum, New York

156 pages, 8 3/4 x 11, 80 color + 22 b/w illus.

Hardcover with slipcase, $45

ISBN: 978-0-300-24724-4

THE JEWISH MUSEUM

1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Louise Bourgeois, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit
National Gallery of Art, Washington
November 15, 2015 - May 15, 2016

Evocative drawings, prints, and sculptures by Louise Bourgeois will be presented in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art from November 15, 2015 through May 15, 2016. The 21 works in the exhibition, either drawn from the collection or promised to the Gallery, reveal Bourgeois's intensely personal approach to art-making and explore her grounding in surrealism and ties to existentialism. Highlights include a vintage copy of He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), comprising nine engravings and nine disquieting parables; Germinal (1967), a strangely compelling marble sculpture; and M is for Mother (1998), a drawing of an imposing letter M that conveys not only maternal comfort but also maternal control.

"We are pleased to celebrate Louise Bourgeois in this compelling presentation," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "The National Gallery of Art first acquired works by Bourgeois in 1992, when our Collectors Committee purchased and donated three of her early sculptures and a fourth was donated by the artist. Since then, especially in the last decade, our collection of works by Bourgeois has been enhanced mainly through generous gifts and pledges by Dian Woodner of New York and Tony Podesta of Washington, but also in last year's acquisition of an outstanding drawing from the Corcoran Gallery of Art."

Louise Bourgeois

Born to a prosperous Parisian family, French American Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) first encountered the surrealists in France as a university student in the 1930s. After marrying the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moving to New York in 1938, she became reacquainted with the European surrealists who were exiled during the war. Surrealism informed her early endeavors as an artist, including her early prints, paintings, and drawings, as well as the human-size totemic sculptures for which she first gained renown. However, Bourgeois never identified with the male-dominated movement and bristled at critics who labeled her a surrealist. Instead, she self-identified as an existentialist, not only quoting philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in interviews but also naming one of her sculptures after Sartre's play No Exit.

The National Gallery of Art owns 19 works by Bourgeois—drawings, prints, sculptures, and an illustrated book, the puritan (1990)—and five additional works have been promised to the Gallery. Collectively dating from the early 1940s to 1998, they include many rare and important pieces. Indeed, the Gallery's Bourgeois collection is distinguished not for its size but for its extraordinary quality. Bourgeois's monumental Spider (1996, cast 1997) is on view in the Gallery's Sculpture Garden.

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit: Exhibition Highlights

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit will present key early works, including three pen drawings (1947–1950) that evoke the cascading rivers and mountain peaks of Aubusson, the tapestry-producing region of France and home to Bourgeois's mother's family. Other highlights include the artist's psychologically charged print project, He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947)—a work that signals the imagery and themes that would engage Louise Bourgeois until her death at age 98—and three of Bourgeois's totemic sculptures installed in a small, relatively enclosed space to faintly allude to the three souls of Sartre's play, No Exit, forced to co-exist in the same room in hell. Also on view are more recent works: the puritan (1990), an extraordinary book written and illustrated by Bourgeois, one of only a few copies hand-colored by the artist, and the drawing My Hand (1997), an image of the artist's knobby hand penned in striking red and splayed on a sheet of music paper.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Exhibition Curator: Judith Brodie, curator of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
www.nga.gov

Louise Bourgeois, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Stitches in Time

Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

26 November 2003 - 22 February 2004

The first large-scale exhibition in Ireland by Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time includes an extraordinary group of life-size sewn fabric busts, a series of cell-like vitrines, housing curious scenes of torture and ecstasy, and a small group of totemic figures, reinterpreting in fabric Bourgeois’s very first sculptures of the late 1940s and ‘50s. Over 20 pieces, most created in the last three years, are accompanied by a selection of the artist’s graphic work including 'He disappeared into Complete Silence', 1946, her first major suite of etchings and poems in which she unfolds tales of loss and loneliness.

Born in 1911, LOUISE BOURGEOIS was one of the first artists to assert the importance of autobiography and identity as subjects for contemporary artists. Her family background and childhood in the suburbs of Paris and the traumatic relationship between her father, mother and governess have continued to underpin her work throughout her long career. 'Seven in a Bed', 2001, for example, seems to distil the artist’s memory of far distant weekend mornings when she and her siblings would tumble into bed with their parents, but the Janus-like addition of extra heads warns us that things, especially people, are not always what they seem.

In the 1980s Louise Bourgeois began making a series of theatrical spaces entitled 'Cells', representing different types of pain – “the physical, the emotional and the psychological, and the mental and the intellectual”. The 'Cells' are self-contained or partial enclosures which can be experienced either by entering the space or by encountering it close up through mesh walls, doors or windows. These works are the anthesis of Bourgeois’ famous monumental installations, such as the three vast towers, 'I do, I undo, I redo', commissioned for the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.

Some of the most arresting of Louise Bourgeois’ recent works are a series of extraordinary upright and front-facing fabric heads, of which three can be seen in the exhibition. Sewn with a crudeness that belies their structural sophistication, they are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear moist from exhalation and their eyes apparently focus directly on the viewer, or seem to deliberately glance away. These are difficult works to confront; a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.

Born in Paris during the heyday of Cubism, Louise Bourgeois moved to New York following her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater. Her first exhibition of sculpture took place in 1949. Although her early work was respected by contemporaries, it was not until she was 71 that she received wider acclaim for her first major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition revealed a sculptor of startling originality and a unique ability to work with many different materials, from marble and bronze to latex and fabric. The event gave Louise Bourgeois the confidence and opportunity to set out, in fascinating detail, not only the domestic dramas of her childhood but also the architecture, furnishings and artefacts which had surrounded her as the child of a mother whose family had been engaged in the Aubusson tapestry industry and a father who was a dealer in restored tapestry and antique furniture.

Now in her 92nd year Louise Bourgeois’s artistic practice has spanned the best part of the last century. She has always led the field of innovation, often working at more than one remove from the well-known avant-garde movements of her lifetime: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art.

The exhibition is selected by Frances Morris, Senior Curator, Tate Modern, and is co-curated by her with Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA.

A catalogue published by IMMA and August Projects, with an essay by Frances Morris, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Louise Bourgeois at Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown - Sleepwalking

Louise Bourgeois: Sleepwalking

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown

November 24, 2001 - August 25, 2002

“I’m in a state of sleepwalking which has something to do with the impression I have of not being able to focus my attention on anything for long. At the same time my brain is tremendously active. I have all sorts of ideas and plans in my head and I’m all set to write, or to draw--anything...”

- Louise Bourgeois, Diary entry, November 19, 1944

Louise Bourgeois has always had an abundance of ideas and plans in her head, and has realized hundreds of them over the course of seven decades. With the recent commission of Eyes, 2001, a monumental, permanent, outdoor sculpture by this influential artist, the museum has brought into its galleries a select sampling of her artwork to compliment and provide a context for the sculpture outside. This selection includes, twenty drawings, six sculptures, a photograph of the artist from 1982 by Robert Mapplethorpe, and an audio track titled, Otte from 1995 in which Bourgeois sings a song she wrote in her native French.

Sleepwalking touches on a range of motifs and themes within Louise Bourgeois’ prolific body of work, including that of the “insomnia drawings,” intimate works, primarily in ink on paper, that have aided the artist through an ongoing battle with sleeplessness. Drawings of this nature, such as the 1998 Untitled (I Can or Will Fall Asleep), together with the sculptures in the exhibition, provide a glimpse into her working method. As indicated in her diary entry from 1944 above, Louise Bourgeois is in a constant flux of production, moving effortlessly between materials and motifs, between small works and large public installations. For example, Spider II, 1995, included in the exhibition, is a smaller, yet no less powerful, prototype for Louise Bourgeois’ massive public installation, Maman and two smaller Spiders, recently on view at Rockefeller Center in NYC. While her work has undergone dramatic formal changes over the years she has remained loyal to a handful of visual and psychological subjects: family groups, personal spaces and the fragmented human form.

Louise Bourgeois began her career as a painter and print-maker but sculpture has been her dominant medium since the late 1940s. Though her work shared some stylistic attributes with popular art movements such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, because of her gender and her intentionally idiosyncratic style, she remained on the fringes of these groups. Her modest public persona was exploded by the critically acclaimed 1982 MoMA retrospective, Louise Bourgeois, the first of its kind for a woman artist. She has since received many prestigious awards and honors including the first Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Sculpture Center, Washington DC in 1991; distinction as the United States representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale; and the National Medal of the Arts at the White House in 1997. In recent years, she has completed a number of large-scale installations and commissioned public works, including the museum’s 75th anniversary sculpture, Eyes, 2001 located on the front lawn and entrance courtyard.

Louise Bourgeois: Sleepwalking was organized by Abigail Guay, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art ‘02 with Lisa Dorin Curatorial and Programs Assistant.

WILLIAMS COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART - WCMA

15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Ste 2, Williamstown, MA 01267

www.wcma.org

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro - Marlborough Chelsea, New York - Inaugural Exhibition

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro

Marlborough Chelsea, New York

September 18 - October 25, 1997

For its inaugural exhibition, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, presents sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois and Sir Anthony Caro. 

The gallery's inaugural exhibition presents one work each by Abakanowicz, Bourgeois and Caro. Each of these works through their physical and conceptual presence, commands and defines the gallery's architectural spaces, creating three interrelated but markedly different environments. These sculptures are of such independent and forceful character that they dominate their environments through the drama of a physical discourse that captures the viewer as if he or she had stumbled into a theater and onto a stage occupied by giants.

Magdalena Abakanowicz channels her deeply personal feelings about loss, isolation, displacement and regeneration as experienced throughout her childhood in Poland into her sculpture. Gouged and smooth bronze surfaces display the marks of the artist's fingers and nails; her work becomes an expressionist rendering in three-dimensional form of angst, aggression and strength. Rather than representing a single historical moment, group or tragedy, Magdalena Abakanowicz says that her work "is about the human condition in general". Backward Seated Figures (1992-93), comprised of 20 bronze forms, suggests a crowd of people seated on the floor, hunched over slightly. The air between each sculpture is heavy and fraught with tension; the installation creates a mood which fills the gallery and pushes at the walls, enveloping the viewer. The installation at Marlborough Chelsea will be the first showing of this piece in the United States.

A native of France, American sculptor Louise Bourgeois' work developed initially in the 1940s through her exposure to the Surrealists. Her later works reflect a continuing interest in feminism and forms related to the body. While many of her recent projects have explored and represented personal recollections of childhood memories and experiences through seemingly fragile and delicate forms, Eyes (1995), included in this exhibition, is monumentally forceful in both its physical and conceptual presence. The pair of massive granite spherical eyes with hemispherical irises captures everything that falls within their gaze. At the direction of  Louise Bourgeois, the eyes have been positioned at a distance apart to reflect the proportions of a monolithic face. The eyes are positioned to create a field of vision and depth of focus that extends beyond the walls of the gallery into the city - the sculpture is both a corporeal anchor and conceptual window.

British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who recently joined Marlborough for his North American representation, shapes mass and the spaces which his forms inhabit in a powerful yet carefully constructed way. His new work created specifically for this exhibition, Wareham Ziggurat (1997), rises over 12 feet high with its towering stepped shape. Ascending from floor to ceiling, the work forces one's attention upwards into the spaces that most sculpture does not reach. Because of the internal architectural "rooms" within the sculpture, the spectator is drawn inside and therefore deals with both external and internal notions of architectural form and space. The giant railroad sleepers from which the sculpture is made are stacked high like a vast pyramid, giving the work a physicality that is primal, ancient and mysteriously ritualistic in character.

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro will be followed by a group show curated by Raymond Foye, on view from November 1 through November 29, 1997. An exhibition of work by Spanish sculptor Francisco Leiro opens December 3, and will remain on view through January 3, 1998.

Marlborough Chelsea

211 West 19th Street, New York, NY

www.malgoroughgallery.com