Louise Bourgeois
23 March - 01 June 2013
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| Louise Bourgeois
Lair, 1986 - 2000
Lead, hanging piece
109.2 x 53.3 x 53.3 cm / 43 x 21 x 21 in |
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LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Rare and Important Works from a Private Collection
23 March - 1 June 2013
The Karsten Greve Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Rare and
Important Works from a Private Collection devoted entirely to Louise
Bourgeois. With this event, Karsten Greve pays homage to one of the
greatest artists of our time, with whom the gallery has been working for
thirty years. The exhibition unveils an early period in the artist’s
creation showing a great number of sculptures from the end of the
1940’s. These include old works that have rarely been exhibited and that
cover an essential role in Louise Bourgeois’ production. Displaying
great formal variety, the works presented bear witness to the
fundamental subjects addressed by the artist throughout her long,
creative and extremely rich career. The exhibited sculptures thus allow
the visitor to travel through the major moments of her work, which is
both constantly enigmatic and explicit at the same time.
Louise Bourgeois’ biography is an integral part of her creations. The
artist’s life and her works are bound together so deeply that it is
impossible to understand the one without the other. In this sense, the
surface of the sculptures, just like the line of her drawings and the
presence even of the installations are imbued with experiences lived in
her childhood. Born into a family of ancient textile restorers, Louise
Bourgeois began helping her parents in their workshop on the Boulevard
Saint Germain at the age of ten. She then began her studies at the
Sorbonne in mathematics, which she never completed and instead, switched
to philosophy. These two paths, which are both different and
convergent, were seen by the artist as two distinct paths leading to the
same thing, which was the search for stability - a kind of order and
perhaps even logic in her life. Though the greater part of her artistic
production was produced in New York where she set up after marrying the
American art historian Robert Goldwater, Paris and France remained
references throughout her life. Paris was her birthplace, the city of
her blossoming at the Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre, the city she
left that became so distant. But France is also the country of her
family nightmare, which is at the origin of all of her works, the place
of trauma from which she needed to distance herself in order to survive.
The bronze sculptures, rising up straight and slender, cover an
essential role in the artistic and personal story of the artist.
Personnages, which is the title given to these works of her youth, were
produced between 1947 and 1950. These precariously balanced streamlined
monoliths became the symbol of the psychological instability the artist
lived through during these years. Having left Paris for New York in
1938, it was during this period that Louise Bourgeois felt a deep
nostalgia for France and the people that were close to her. Bringing
together these totemic elements allows the visitor to enter the space of
revocation and memory where they find themselves surrounded by
personages/people as in a social context. By revoking her youth, Louise
Bourgeois likewise confronts the theme of the woman-mother, which is
probably at the origins of her entire œuvre. The sculptures Pregnant
Woman I and II along with Woman with a Secret, produced between 1947 and
1949, are thus rare examples of the first developments of this subject
that the artist subsequently deepened throughout her life. The
ambivalence between man and woman, just like that between woman and
mother, is a fundamental element in her works where the references to
genre become blurred and uncertain.
The concept of refuge and shelter is a constant in Louise Bourgeois’
work. Seen both as a place to hide and a lair from which to exit, refuge
represents a key element in the work of the artist. She develops it
constantly in a formal progression that begins with Nids, (Nests) "body
inhabitants” representing organic dwelling places and ends with
Cellules, (Cells), which are cage-like grills reconstituting the rooms
of houses. The work Lair is part of this research. It involves a lair
made of lead where one is stuck and protected at the same time. The
presence we sense inside, in the dark, is the symbol of the secret that
is protecting itself in the house/refuge. In this sense, Lair is the
example of a foreshadowed exorcism that has not yet been entirely
completed and which confers a compression of emotional tension and
expressive power to the work.
As of the 1990’s, aluminium began to appear in Louise Bourgeois’ work.
The brilliance that is introduced by this material accentuates the
aggression provoked by the sharpened contours of the works. This offers
the visitor a perceptible experience that symbolises the artist’s
interior state, as is the case for the piece The Mirror made in 1998.
The mirror does not reflect the image of the person facing it but rather
the artist’s state of mind. What we see is her intimacy, deformed,
troubled and incomprehensible. By conceiving art like a guarantee of
psychic health, Louise Bourgeois turns the creative process into a
veritable exorcism. The artistic act becomes then the only means of
pacifying and rationalising the profound wounds rooted in her personal
history.
Louise Bourgeois was born on December 25th, 1911 in Paris. She was
admitted to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and frequented, among others,
Fernand Léger’s studio. The artist was awarded the inaugural
installation at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2000.
Her works are featured in the greatest collections and museums of the
world, notably MOMA and the Pompidou Centre. Her works are likewise
included in prestigious private collections. Throughout her career,
Louise Bourgeois has obtained numerous distinctions such as the Lion
d’Or received at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Légion d’Honneur in
2008. In 2009 she was honoured by the National Women’s Hall of Fame for
having marked the history of the United States. Louise Bourgeois became
an American citizen in 1951, and died in New York on May 31st, 2010 at
the age of ninety-eight.
www.artnet.com/kgreve-paris.html http://artnews.org/karstengreveparis/?exi=38024&Louise_Bourgeois
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