Louise Bourgeois

Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien, Louise Bourgeois: Back and Forth, 2005-2006, p. 42, illustrated

Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Fondazione Vedova, Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works,  p. 196, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The fabric is stitched to the backing board at all four corners, and at intervals along the top and vertical edges.
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Four Exceptional Works by Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois indisputably stands among the most important and revered artists of the twentieth century: the first female artist ever to be honoured with a solo exhibition at MoMA, New York in 1982, her enormous contribution to the trajectory of art history is unparalleled. Driven by an inner compulsion to create work from nascent familial trauma and childhood memories, Bourgeois' production negotiates and incessantly recapitulates her psychical experiences of loss, severance and mourning across a pioneering and plural artistic terrain of sculpture, painting, installation, drawing and textile works. Unlike any artist before or since, Bourgeois' poetic and often-painful response to her own psychobiography takes on a powerfully universal aesthetic agenda: sexual-political power dynamics, gendered embodiment and identity are enmeshed and woven into the fabric of her work. 

Together with three other extraordinary examples from the present collection offered as part of the Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 26^th June, the following four artworks continue to demonstrate Bourgeois' personal individualism and originality.. Spanning over 60 years in breadth, this plural compendium narrates an evolution from the pivotal corpus of Personages executed between the late 1940s up to the mid 1950s, through to the seminal late production that emerged during the 1990s, up to the very last body of work ever produced by the artist.

Vacillating between abstraction and figuration, and traversing a truly monumental period in world history, the epic course of Bourgeois' production, as wonderfully communicated in the present works, has imparted a revolutionary artistic legacy.

This collection includes two insightful patterned examples from the renowned series of Insomnia Drawings, through which Bourgeois sought relief and resolution during her troubled sleep. These immediate and highly personal paper works permit access into the artist's disquieted mind, laying bare a tormented freedom of expression, forged with childhood memories and underlined anxiety. An intricately spiralling web-like textile from 2005 is a wonderful example of Bourgeois' later return to a familiar material that enveloped her childhood. Helping her parents in their tapestry restoration workshop from a young age, Bourgeois would become a hoarder of clothes and fabrics, an association which would remain dear to her throughout her life. There is an affection given to the carefully woven fabric of Untitled, reminiscent of spiderwebs and kaleidoscopes. Bourgeois reflected
"I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole". 

Bourgeois' psychical bereavement has forever been reflected in her choice of materials; her emotions and preoccupations seep into her body of work. The delicacy of the rose fabric and subject matter of Je t'aime is juxtaposed with an outline of a flower incised on a cumbersome steel sheet, combining a romanticism and innocence from childhood with an element of sadness and nostalgia. As reflected throughout Bourgeois' oeuvre, her artworks serve to reconstruct the past and recall the missing. Her pioneering exploration of a primal and obsessive psychological world continues to resonate strongly in contemporary art today.