Louise Bourgeois : The Woven Child

the found child 2004

Classical statues made of permanent materials awaken our feelings of mortality as we realize they will outlive us. 

A sculpture made from soft, perishable textiles, evokes the body's vulnerability much more directly, arousing our latent awareness that we are all essentially sacks of skin hung around a structure of bones and stuffed with blood and organs.             

Ralph Rugoff (director of the Hayward Gallery in London, England) 

untitled 1999

For Bourgeois, sewing goes beyond restoration.  Instead, it is a metaphor for psychological repair and for exploring the complexity of human relationships.  

In her artworks, repairs become conspicuous scars.  Sewing is a subtle form of communication and atonement.  The gesture and labour involved evokes complex feelings in another person.  Sewing, the act of reparation, was a defence against fragmentation and disintegration.  

 Julienne Lorz, chief curator 2018-2021. Gropius Bau, Berlin. 

couple IV 1997

Louise Bourgeois makes her passage through the intimate terrain of private and chaotic experience without being destabilized by its violent emotion.  Her triumph lies in the retaining of artistic objectivity in the face of the most fiercely subjective materials.

Rachel Cusk, novelist

untitled 2001

Bourgeois renews her allegiance to the truth of her female history and its origins in her child self.  Size, scale, and the monumental can be arrived at, stitched together, organically built up, as in her series of tall fabric pillar shapes, both assertive and resolutely handmade.  

Rachel Cusk, author of several works of fiction and non fiction

the cold of anxiety 2001

"I cannot renounce the past.  I cannot and do not want to forget it."  Louise Bourgeois

the cold of anxiety detail, 2001

untitled 2005

I would like to embroider and put everything in place and in a proper and predictable manner.  To simplify, reduce, organize, round up and retire after being sure of the method.  

Drawn in and concentric I would like to be.  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2006

Sewing implies repairing.  

When you mend things, it allows you to have your hands occupied.  To look intensely and never meet the eyes of other people.  You can even be moral about it.  

You can appear to do things for others.

You can say, "I am repairing your clothes."  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2002

My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go through.  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2004

Bourgeois' sculptures, at once baroque and schematic, subvert any possible association with platonic completeness.  Female forms simultaneously subvert and implicate a voyeuristic gaze.  At the same time, through its use of materials that we are accustomed to feeling against our skin, a dimension of haptic sensation and tactile association is opened up, beyond purely visual engagement.  

Ralph Rugoff (director of the Venice Biennale 2019)

the mute, 2002

This final body of work counts as one of the greatest late-career chapters in the history of art.  A body of work in which lifelong concerns of Bourgeois:  destabilising of boundaries, ambiguous sexuality, and a sliding register of meaning / identity, are revisited in profoundly enlivening ways.   Ralph Rugoff   

 

All images and text in this post are from the catalogue that documented Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child,  an exhibition that was presented at the Hayward Gallery, London England and Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany in 2022.  All the works in the exhibition were made from LB's personal saved clothing and domestic textiles when the artist was in her 80's and 90's.  (Bourgeois died age 99 in 2010.)

Louise Bourgeois

Once I was beset by anxiety.
I couldn't tell right from left.
I could have cried out with terror at being lost.
But I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining where the moon would come out, where the sun would appear in the morning. 2007 untitled

I saw myself in relation to the stars.

Louise Bourgeois 1911 - 2010

2005 untitled

At the age of 40, Louise Bourgeois, wife and mother, exhibited a group of painted abstract wooden figures in a gallery in New York and one of them was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. 2008 untitled
That she did this was a challenge to the status quo of society in the late 40’s and 50’s. Her work was a challenge to modernism. Even then. 2002 The Woven Child
Louise Bourgeois’ work was looked at with renewed interest by the feminist movement in the early 1970’s. Renowned feminist art critic Lucy R. Lippard wrote: “Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker’s psyche. It can’t be categorised. Can’t be art historicised”. 2006 untitled
Over her 70 year career Louise Bourgeois has not had a signature material and has managed to remain ‘contemporary’ for three separate generations. Famously neurotic she has been an undeniable influence on younger women artist. "Art is the guarantee of sanity" was her mantra. Her early work was made from wood and house paint and her late work was made from cloth and thread. Using these ‘low’ materials, she worked subversively from within the formal modernist
language of abstract form. She insisted that her work was always about her own personal memories. She believed that the needle is magical and has a restorative power. “It’s a claim to forgiveness” 2001 Rejection
Her most recent work was made from her own and found domestic textiles. The hand sewn fabric figurative pieces are stitched so crudely that they look mended rather than constructed. Placed in vulnerable and intimate positions they connect with the viewer on an emotional level. 2001 untitled
In 2001 she created a series of three eight foot high fabric towers. They relate to her early wooden pieces, slender and vertical, installed alone but are part of a group. One of the towers is stitched from the antique tapestry fabric that references her childhood. Louise Bourgeois has often said that all of her work is an attempt to reconcile with that traumatic childhood. Just before creating these towers she also made portraits of her parents, depicting her father as a small chair and her mother as the now famous Maman, a massive metal spider with eggs in a basket.

The evident stitching adds hands on emotional quality to this lonely narrow structure, and one reads it as an erect old lady standing stiffly alone, an
abstracted portrait of Louise Bourgeois herself, 90 years old in 2001. 2006 untitled
The pieces shown here are new, created in the last years of her long life. They seem purified. They seem resigned. 2002 untitled
Unlike many women of her generation, there are no shortages of web sites that showcase Louise Bourgeois. click here for example. She is collected by nearly every major art gallery world wide. These images are from two books. Louise Bourgeois 2008edited by Frances Morris and Louise Bourgeois The Fabric Works 2010 edited by Germano Celant.