Louise Bourgeois

Alternate Titles

• Unfolding portrait

Description

"'Louise Bourgeois : An Unfolding Portrait' explores this celebrated artist's prints and books, a little known but highly significant part of Bourgeois's larger practice. Her copious production in these mediums - addressing themes that perennially occupied her, including memory, trauma, and the body - is examined here within the context of related sculptures, drawings, and paintings. This investigation sheds light on Bourgeois's creative process, which is uniquely and vividly apparent through the evolving states and variants of her prints; seeing these sequences unfold is akin to looking over the artist's shoulder as she worked. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalogue features an insightful essay by curator (and longtime friend of the artist) Deborah Wye, examining Bourgeois's involvement with these mediums alongside the developments of her long life and career. Interviews with three of the artist's close collaborators further illuminate her artistic practice and output, some three hundred examples of which are presented in this volume." Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait' explores the prints, books, and creative process of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). Bourgeois's printed oeuvre, a little-known aspect of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,400 printed compositions, created primarily in the last two decades of her life but also at the beginning of her career, in the 1940s. Over the course of her career, Bourgeois constantly revisited the themes of her art, all of which emerged from emotions she struggled with for a lifetime. Also, she said there was no rivalry between the mediums in which she worked, noting that they say the same thing in different ways. Here, her prints and illustrated books will be seen in the context of related sculptures, drawings, and paintings, and within thematic groupings that explore motifs of architecture, the body, and nature, as well as investigations of abstraction and works made from old garments and household fabrics. Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States (24.09.2017 - 28.01.2018).

Subjects