ART CITIES:Tel Aviv-Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois is one of the most brilliant and influential artist of the 20th Century. Her work always centered upon the reconstruction of memory, and in her 98 years, she produced an astounding body of sculptures, drawings, books, prints, and installations, which combined sexuality and psychoanalysis and contributed to developing feminist theory.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Tel Aviv Museum Of Art Archive
The exhibition “Twosome” is the first Museum first museum exhibition in Israel of the work of Louise Bourgeois. The work that gives the title of the exhibition “Twosome” (1991) was first presented in “DISLOCATIONS”, a group exhibition organized by the MoMA. It can be read in different ways, the tension between opposing forces is central. Several polarities are at play: inside and outside, acceptance and rejection, introjection, and projection, separation and reunion. At the time of its first installation of “Twosome” Bourgeois described the piece as follows: “This piece was invested with the size of the family. It is scaled to the relations of the family and the house… It relates to birth, sex, excretion – taking in and pushing out. In and out covers all our functions. In and out is a key to the piece. It’s a meditation on these words, a metaphor for being in and out of trouble, in and out of fashion, in and out of line, in and out of synch, in and out of focus, in and out of bounds”. Though Bourgeois made drawings of the spider as early as the ‘40s, it was not until the mid-1990s that this motif was realized in sculptural form. Bourgeois associated the spider with her mother, a tapestry weaver and restorer. She felt her mother, like a spider, was clever, dainty, and fastidious. The two spiders in “Spider Couple” (2003) might be seen as a portrait of the grown artist and her mother, their legs woven together. One of the spider’s legs touches the other as it crosses over it, as if in loving protection. Fabricated in cast aluminum, the two figures in “Couple” (2003) are meant to hold on to each other for eternity. Bourgeois suffered from a lifelong fear of separation and abandonment, a dread rooted in the events of her early childhood. Made out of various materials and at different scales, and sometimes hanging precariously together from a single wire, Bourgeois’s many couple sculptures express an anxiety defined by the potential loss of the love object. The suspended sculptures also have the capacity to spin in opposite directions, existing in a perpetual state of fragility and ambivalence. Spirals, which abound in Bourgeois’s work and are echoed in the movement of the rotating figures, have duality inherent to their form.
Info: Curators: Suzanne Landau and Jerry Gorovoy, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Lilly and Yoel-Moshe Elstein Multi-Purpose Gallery, 27 Shaul Hamelech Blvd., Tel Aviv, Duration: 8/9/17-20/1/18, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Sat 10:00-18:00, Tue & Thu 10:00-21:00, Fri 10:00-14:00, www.tamuseum.org.il
