Louise Bourgeois is a lasting influence on many artists, but also on fashion, textile designers and yarn manufacturers. Fashion designer Simone Rocha wrote her college thesis on Bourgeois and returned to her as an inspiration for her A/W 2015-16 collection. The latter, as you may remember from a previous post, was inspired by Bourgeois' wall relief "Mamelles" (1991) a series of breasts in pale pink synthetic rubber reproducing a frieze-like formation.
Rocha will be talking part in a conversation with British artist Phyllida Barlow about Louise Bourgeois at the end of March. The conversation is part of the calendar of events linked with a new exhibition dedicated to Bourgeois at the Hayward Gallery (Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road) in London.
"Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child" (till 15 May 2022; the exhibition will then go on tour and open in July at Gropius Bau, Berlin) is the first major retrospective about this legendary artist focusing exclusively on the works that she made with fabrics and textiles during the final chapter of her career, from the mid-1990s to her death in 2010.
In her career Bourgeois experimented a lot with different materials such as bronze, stone, but also rubber, latex and plaster to express complex feelings.
The main inspiration behind her works was often the same: at the core of her pieces there was her family, the relationship with her parents - Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois - and her father's infidelities and the traumas and resentments they caused her as a child (when she was eleven she discovered that her English governess Sadie was also her father's mistress).
Quite often, Bourgeois incorporated pieces of cloth - elements that somehow connected once again the artist with her family and their business (as a girl she also helped in her mother's tapestry restoration business in France) into figures or formations that had some human shape. Fertility, physicality and sexuality mixed with a will to fragment the human body and explore it, while tackling (always with a healthy dose of subversive humour) issues such as fear, violence, danger and destruction.
Bourgeois was known for never throwing away anything and in the mid-1990s the artist asked her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, to empty the cupboards on the upper floors of her home in Chelsea, New York. The garments that were found – her own old clothes, but also her late mother and her husband's - were then sorted in her studio.
Their smells and the people they had belonged to inspired Bourgeois new works: some of these garments were entirely incorporated in installations, other fabrics - such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry - were cut, sliced or ripped into pieces to be later on restitched and reassembled together in unique sculptures or used for textile drawings.
These acts were symbolical: they preserved the past, transforming it, while they also hinted at the anger provoked by her childhood trauma and at the same time represented an act of reparation.
In this exhibition there are 90 works, some of them exploring identity, sexuality, family relationships, motherhood and memory, among them pieces that were never shown before in the UK, including Bourgeois' Cells incorporating old dresses, slips, and nightwear, and her installation "Spider" (1997), a 15ft sculpture cast in bronze that rests above a steel cage, and the related Cell piece, "Lady in Waiting" (2003), integrating fragments of antique tapestry.
For Bourgeois the spider was protector and predator, a key symbol in her practice especially for its ability to weave from its own body. It was used as a metaphor for her artistic process, but also associated with her mother, a weaver and tapestry restorer.
As she stated in an interview in 1998: "I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."
The exhibition offers the chance to stop and admire a series of figurative sculptures and abstract configurations, such as bulbous sacs or stuffed mounds displayed in vitrines.
Dismembered limbs and headless couples dangle from the ceiling, while fabric heads on plinths are beautifully crafted while looking very disturbing as, like a two headed Janus, they seem to have more than one face.
Displays of male and female anatomies or clusters of anatomies merged together to create phallic breasts evoke memories that turn into emotionally distressful obsessions, while piled up cushions and solid textile blocks forming towers reference the vertical sculptural forms that dominated her early work in the 1940s and '50s.
The exhibition explores the duality behind dichotomies such as physical body Vs psyche, the conscious and the unconscious, and the potential for cutting and fragmenting something (from fabrics to memories) and repairing it with a simple needle, considered by the artist as "a claim to forgiveness", a tool with a magic power - repairing damages.
The exhibition also features a selection of Bourgeois' vibrant fabric drawings, books, prints and collages, including collages which feature large-scale clock faces that she produced during the final year of her life.
"The Woven Child" is an ideal exhibition for those art fans who love textiles and for textiles designers, but it's not just for them as there is a lot to discover behind Bourgeois's works, metaphors and symbolism.
In a press release Ralph Rugoff, Director at the Hayward Gallery, states about the event: "Bourgeois's carefully considered use of varied fabrics, including time-worn materials, imbues her late sculptures with a striking sense of intimacy, vulnerability and mortality. Over a decade after the artist's death, these works continue to challenge us with questions that seem more compelling and urgent than ever."
For those visitors who may not be able to attend, there is a digital guide on Bloomberg Connects (available for download from Google Play or the App Store), the free app that makes it easy to access and engage with arts and culture from mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. Through the app it is possible to discover exclusive content and unique insights into "Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child".
Image credits for this post
All images in this post: Installation views of "Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child" at Hayward Gallery, 2022. © The Easton Foundation/DACS, London and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mark Blower / © The Hayward Gallery
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