LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Louise Bourgeois isn’t just one of my favorite artists.  She is one of my heroes. This is a woman who continued to reinvent her art well into the last two decades of her life, when she was in her 80’s and 90’s.  She never stopped remembering, reworking, rethinking, reimagining, or recreating her life into her body of work. 

We saw an exhibition of her last creative efforts—all done with textiles--at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin a few months ago.  It was absolutely astonishing to see the manual dexterity and the acuity of vision she retained in order to sew with invisible stitches fabric landscapes, fabric portraits, and fabric sculptures. 

The Museum catalogue contains photos of the entire exhibition, including the wall texts.  Here is an excerpt from the catalogue, giving a brief artist biography and the curators’ insights into the works on display:

In the final two decades of her life, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) embarked on a daring new chapter in the development of her art. During this period she created an astonishingly inventive group of sculptures, drawings and installations that incorporated domestic fabrics, including clothing, linens and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history. Many of these late works returned to, and recalibrated, the core concerns and formal devices of her earlier art, exploring sexual ambiguities and harrowing psychological and social relationships.

Bourgeois’s use of soft materials – including the “second skin” of her own clothes – often imbues these works with a sensuous quality and an almost tactile sense of vulnerability and intimacy. She saw the actions involved in fabricating [pun intended?] them in metaphorical terms, relating the cutting, ripping, sewing and joining to notions of reparation and to the bodily expression of psychic tensions.

As the daughter of tapestry restorers, the artist’s turn to textiles in her eighties could be seen as a renewed exploration of her past. At the same time, her fabric works invite us to reimagine the meanings of mending, including a concept of emotional repair that – rather than neatly sewing everything up – can expand and refresh our perspectives.

Here is a sample of what we saw.

Landscapes that at first glance seem to be paintings, but which are in actuality made of fabric and sewn with invisible stitches.

Embroidered tea towel paintings decorated with scraps of fabric trim, beads, appliques, hooks and eyes, and other sewing items, several with references to clocks and the passage of time.

 

References to insemination (the biological clock?) and the bloom and womb of pregnancy.

Weavings and spider webs, the latter two below made of mattress ticking.

Exquisitely expressive heads (some recalling Picasso's multi-faceted portraits) formed out of tapestry, terry cloth, corduroy, cotton batting, woolens, or hop sacking mesh.

Interesting were the Tower of Babel fabric columns, one free standing and another placed in a mysterious vetrine.

Occupying an entire room of its own was an enormous sculpture of a steel spider protecting a steel mesh enclosure, draped with tattered tapestries and including a vacant chair.  Spiders are a recurring theme in Bourgeois’ work, and are thought to be a reference to her mother, a tapestry weaver.

These "gentle arts" of making and repairing items out of textiles, domestic activities associated with the feminine, were very affecting.  I found some of these works a bit unsettling, very graphic, and highly charged, and yet others were familiar, subtle, and reassuring.  It seemed to me that Bourgeois wanted in the dusk of her long life to express to us the duality of her personal existence.  She fearlessly showed us the rending of her past but also the mending of it.  In that I found a life lesson.  Each of us is tirelessly weaving a web of experience, fixing its tears, shedding tears and laughter along the way, and in the end creating a unique story.

Keep it real!

Marilyn