ART ESCAPE

Louise Bourgeois 1911 - 2010

An Artist and Sculptor, born in France, one of the most influential artists of the 20^th century, who worked in a wide variety of materials and mediums but perhaps was best known for her Spider Sculptures entitled  “ Maman ”.  

Louise Bourgeois was already in her lates eighties when in 2000 she exhibited her 35ft tall spider sculpture in the Tate modern Gallery in London. She created  an impact and won international acclaim late in life and for much of her early career was regarded within the art world as the unassuming wife of critic Robert Goldwater. Her turbulent relationship with her father provided a creative impulse and much of her work draws inspiration from painful childhood memories and traumas.

Her father was domineering and a philanderer which had a great effect on her life, on discovering her fathers affair with her English nanny her pain and revenge is played out with a pink plaster and latex ensemble of phallic or mammalian protrusions gathered round a table where the symbolic corpse lies. ( Destruction of the Father, 1974 )

The Spider sculptures were inspired by memories of her mother, described by Bourgeois as “ the spider is an ode to my mother, she was my best friend and very clever, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother “.

Bourgeois’s most important works are dominated by images of fear, sombre darkness, anxiety, loneliness, conflict and frustration with abstract suggestion of the human form, expressing themes of betrayal with sexually suggestive images all representing attempts to explore the source of these emotions. She was compared to second generation surrealist artists such as Frida Kahlo, she channelled her pain into creative concepts producing many sculptures, paintings, drawings and fabric pieces in numerous materials.

Louise Bourgois will be remembered as a founder of confessional Art, she continued working up until her death in 2010 at the age of 98 years, with her last project finished only the week before.

During the creation of her final set of prints she handed them to British Artist Tracey Emin who eventually added to the work, admitting she had carried the images all around the world with her but was afraid to touch them. The joint collection of 16 drawings explores themes of identity, sexuality and the fear of loss and abandonment. Bourgeois began painting male and female torsos in profile mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate silhouettes. Emin used fantasy to draw smaller figures engaged with the torsos enacting the body as desires and anxieties. In many of Emin’s pictures her handwriting accompanies the image as narrative, which puts into words the emotions expressed in Bourgeois’s gouaches.

During her lifetime Bourgeois has produced a significant body of work in a personal visual language, today exhibitions of her work are always in great demand. The Dia Museum in New York features a long term installation of her phallic sculptures and a spider.

Louise Bourgeois died aged 98 years in 2010.

“ Art is a guarantee of sanity,  that is the most important thing I have said “

( Louise Bourgeois )