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Stitches
in Time features 20 of Louise Bourgeois’s most
recent creations, most dating from the last three
years. They include small characters, life-size sewn
busts, totemic figures and display case-cells. In
all of them, cloth acts as a material imbued with
symbolism, suggestive of her traumatic family past.
Born
in Paris in 1911 when Cubism was at its height, Louise
Bourgeois’s father was an antique dealer and
tapestry restorer while her mother worked in the textile
industry in Aubusson (France). Family harmony was
ruptured with the arrival of an English governess
who later became her father’s lover.
This
relationship, and in particular the consequences it
had for her mother, permanently marked Louise Bourgeois’s
artistic career. Seven in a Bed, 2001, for example,
seems to distil the artist’s memory of a far
distant weekend mornings when she and siblings would
tumble into bed with their parents, but the Janus-like
addition of extra heads warns us that things, specially
people, are not always what they seem.
Trained as a painter, Bourgeois began to work in sculpture
in New York in 1938 after her marriage to the art
historian Robert Goldwater. In the late 1940s and
early 1950s, she virtually abandoned painting and
began to create a series of totemic figures in wood
whose verticality evokes the human form. The artist
has recently reinterpreted these early works, this
time in cloth, represented in the exhibition by pieces
such as Untitled 2001 and 2002.
Her
first exhibition of sculpture took place in New York
in 1949. Much later, at the age of seventy-one, Bourgeois
was the first woman artist to be given a retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By then she
had started to make a theatrical spaces entitled Cells,
representing, as she explained, different types of
pain -- “the physical, the emotional and the
psychological, and the mental and the intellectual”.
Constructed from a variety of materials gleaned mostly
from urban skips and demolitions sites, 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. Evoking both the punishment cell of the
prison and the contemplative cell of the convent,
these are spaces for solitary contemplation and self-reflection.
Some
of the most arresting of Bourgeois’ recent works
are a series of extraordinary upright and front-facing
fabric heads, of which five 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.
Stitches
in Time is completed by the series of prints What
is the shape of the problem? (1999), Topiary, the
Art of Improving Nature (1998), and He disappeared
into Complete Silence (1947). The latter is perhaps
her most important work in this field. In it, architectural
structures, some with openings resembling balconies
and windows, are juxtaposed with short texts that
relate an inexplicable tale of privation and of lack
of communication. Although the recall the skyscrapers
of Manhattan, as some critics have suggested, these
drawings remain as mysterious and unyielding as the
texts that accompany them.
Louise
Bourgeois is one of the first artists to affirm the
importance of autobiography and identity as subjects
of art. Throughout her career – one that defies
a linear reading – she has shown herself to be
a sculptor of startling originality, with a unique
ability to work in different materials, from marble
and bronze to latex and cloth.
Bourgeois
has thus been a pioneer in the use of installation
as a means of involving the public in the experience
of art. She has been one of the most influential artists
on contemporary art since the late 1970s, while her
continuing and tireless activity inspires and motivates
new generations of artists.
As
Frances Morris notes in the catalogue of the exhibition:
“at the age of ninety-three, Louise Bourgeois
remains the oldest of young artists”.
Stitches
in Time has been organised by the Irish Museum of
Modern Art, Dublin, and has the sponsorship of GM
Comunicación.
Would
you write your opinion ?
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UNTITLED,
2001.
ARCH
OF HYSTERIA, 2000.
UNTITLED,
2002.
CELL XVI (PORTRAIT), 2000.
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