Louise Bourgeois

Celebrated for her singular contributions to 20th-century sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, installation and writing, French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois' (1911-2010) explorations of the human condition originated from her own lived experience. "My goal is to relive a past emotion," Bourgeois explained. "My art is an exorcism." Psychologically, emotionally and often sexually charged, Bourgeois' works intermingle the abstract and corporeal, the voluptuous and the distressing, to striking effect. Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment accompanies the first exhibition of the artist's work at Glenstone Museum, and features more than 30 major works drawn from the museum's collection. From her early wooden Personages to her large hanging sculptures, from suites of drawings and prints to textile works and her immersive Cells, To Unravel a Torment surveys Bourgeois' career through selected examples from her enormous body of work. Bourgeois was also a prolific writer, matching her sculptural language with reams of psychoanalytic musings on repression, symbolism and material. To Unravel a Torment also brings together never-before-published diary entries by the artist, annotated by Bourgeois scholar Philip Larratt-Smith, a contribution by art historian Briony Fer and an introduction by Emily Wei Rales, founder and director of Glenstone Museum.

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment

edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if youcannot accept it, you become a sculptor."Since the age of twelve, the internationally renowned sculptor LouiseBourgeois has been writing and drawing ;first a diary preciselyrecounting the everyday events of her family life, then notes andreflections. Destruction of the Father ;the title comes fromthe name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in1973 ;contains both formal texts and what the artist calls"pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings andsculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images.Writing is a means of expression that has gained increasing importancefor Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing iscompulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by herintellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense ofliterary form (she has frequently published articles on artists,exhibitions, and art events). Bourgeois, a private woman "withoutsecrets," has given numerous interviews to journalists, artists, andwriters, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hiddenmeanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumasof her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spokenremarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and herbiography and offering new insights into her creative process.

Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997

Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father

Spirals are a recurring motif in the work of Louise Bourgeois, including her sculpture, painting, and drawings from as early as the 50s through 2010 the year of her death. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? The spiral is simultaneously "the fear of losing control" and the experience of "giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself." In another book Bourgeois is quoted as saying "The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and wring them... Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by wringing her neck. The spiral -- I love the spiral -- represents control and freedom." In materials as diverse as wood, steel, bronze, latex, marble, plaster, resin, hemp, lead, ink, pencil, crayon, woodcut, watercolor, and gouache, Bourgeois investigates every imaginable manifestation of the spiral, from graphic patterns to graphite whorls, wobbly orbits to chiseled vortices, twisted columns to coiling snakes, staircases, and pyramids. The cursive blue-paper word drawings, in English and French, complement the purely visual works by conveying the spirit of Bourgeois' poetry in extraordinary pictorial forms.

Spiral

Drawing Center (New York, N.Y.)

Lawrence Rinder

University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Drawings & Observations

Elisabeth Bronfen

Marie-Laure Bernadac

The Insomnia Drawings

Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi

Jerry Gorovoy

Blue Days and Pink Days

Paulo Herkenhoff

Gráfica Reciente

"Infancia"

Robert Storr

Allan Schwartzman

Interview - Survey - Focus - Artist's choice - Artist's writings - Chronology.

uno y otros

Richard Marshall

la elegancia de la ironía : Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, junio de 1995

Escultura de Louise Bourgeois

the fragile

Este é o primeiro livro sobre Louise Bourgeois a ser publicado no Brasil. Seu mérito maior, no entanto, é adotar a mesma ótica confessional e autobiográfica que a escultora, desenhista e gravadora franco-americana usou para realizar sua arte. O foco principal é um rico e introspectivo testemunho de vida. São os diários que ela manteve desde os 12 anos de idade, os inúmeros depoimentos e entrevistas aos jornalistas e críticos. Enfim, as percepções que movem um processo de trabalho e alimentam um entendimento de mundo.

destruição do pai reconstrução do pai : escritos e entrevistas 1923-97

Femme

Wolfgang Tillmans

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Fiona Tan

Paul Schrader

Francesco Clemente

Chris Burden

Luigi Ontani

Or A Splendid Readiness For Death

Saint Sebastian

Deborah Wye

Rosalind E. Krauss

Lucy Lippard

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great lone wolves of 20th-century art. The work of the sculptress, a resident of New York since 1938, has attracted a steadily growing circle of admirers in the U.S. since the 1970s. The strong interest in her work found its first major expression in the retrospective presented by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1982. The work itself cannot be appraised from the detached standpoint of cultural evolution or art history, nor is it possible to associate it with any given group of artists (L. Lippard). It is the expression of radical, personal symbolism that at the same time breaks through the boundaries of the personal sphere in its objectification of fundamental feelings and psycho-physical states. This volume contains a series of essays by leading American art historians, who approach her work from a variety of different perspectives. It also includes a complete bibliography on Louise Bourgeois and her work.

"Developed in close collaboration with the artist and accompanying a major retrospective exhibition that is touring internationally, this book provides a comprehensive overview of Bourgeois's entire career. Designed as an illustrated glossary to her life and work it covers everything from A for Abandonment to W for Words, via F for Family, Father Figures, and Feminism and S for Sexuality, Studio, and Suicide. Also included are selected writings by Bourgeois herself and a full chronology making it the most thorough and up-to-date publication on the artist available."--Jacket.

This is the last exhibition in which Bourgeois was actively involved, and features many of her previously unseen works from the decade leading up to her death. At this time Bourgeois, due to her age and medical condition, had retired from her studio, and was forced to work from her home in New York. Perhaps it was for this reason that the artist stopped working in the medium she is so well-known for, sculpture, and instead began to work with fabric. Despite this change in medium to what many would see as a typically feminine art form, the fabric works are no less powerful and, in some cases aggressive, than her earlier works in wood, plaster, latex and bronze. They exhibit many typical Bourgeoisian themes, and some very familiar motifs.

Suites on Fabric

Scott Lyon-Wall

The Reticent Child

Carol Hynning Smith

Her increasing recognition since then culminated with the selection of her work to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

The Prints of Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

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