ART CITIES:Stockholm-Louise Bourgeois

This spring, Moderna Museet highlights Louise Bourgeois, one of the most important 20th and 21st-century sculptors. Her art serves as a bridge from Modernism and continues to exert its influence on contemporary artistic practices today. Louise Bourgeois – I Have Been to Hell and Back is the most comprehensive Swedish exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s art to date.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet

It demonstrates the width of her oeuvre and presents her captivating and varied body of work over seven decades. One-third of the pieces in the exhibition have never before been shown publicly. Before entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter her monumental work Maman, a gigantic spider sculpture, which is standing outside the museum on Skeppsholmen. The curator of the exhibition Iris Müller-Westermann, says about her job “Louise Bourgeois’s art, which encompasses a range of emotions, is both complex and radical. At times it can be frightening and very direct. Bourgeois expanded the realm of three-dimensional art and became an inspiring innovator in the field of sculpture. She fathoms the depths of human existence, and makes visible her struggle to combine the roles of artist, mother, and wife in the twentieth century. The perspective she formulates is quite different from the male point of view that has for centuries described and explained the world. As Bourgeois stated: ‘I have endeavoured during my whole lifetime as a sculptor to turn woman from an object into an active subject”. Moderna Museet’s Louise Bourgeois “I Have Been to Hell and Back” is a major survey of Bourgeois’s oeuvre and, with more than 100 works, it is the largest exhibition in Sweden to date. It includes forty-seven sculptures, one cell, one painting, and fifty-four works on paper and fabric, stretching over seven decades. The selection aims to show the range of Bourgeois’s work, and highlights her experiments in different materials, techniques and scale.  This alone is sensational. The exhibition itself is divided into nine rooms, each highlighting a theme central to Louise Bourgeois’s work. The rooms do not follow any chronological order. Instead, the exhibition explores how themes were taken up by the artist and developed during various phases of her artistic career.

Info:’’I Have Been to Hell and Back’’, Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Duration: 14/2-17/5/15, Days & Hours: Wed, Thu, Sat, Sun: 10:00-18:00, Tue, Fri: 10:00-20:00, www.modernamuseet.se/sv/Stockholm