ART-PRESENTATION: Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois is widely and justifiably considered one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. Louise Bourgeois described her artistic practice as an attempt to work through whatever tumult plagued her psychologically, personally and artistically, to find perfect harmony. Her work often references human anatomy and sexuality, in some instances overtly and in others more subtlely through organic and ambiguous forms.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MASS MoCA Archive
Louise Bourgeois oeuvre encompassed drawings, paintings, textiles, embroidered works, sculpture, and installations ranging in scale from a few inches to fully immersive environments. MASS MoCA, in partnership with the Louise Bourgeois Trust, presents a group of the artist’s marble sculptures, some of which have never been seen previously in the United States. Bourgeois began working with marble in the early 1960s while living in Avenza, Italy, has resulted in singular works in stone that explore in new ways the same themes that have preoccupied her for decade. However, beginning in the mid-eighties, the artist has integrated individual marble sculptures of naturalistically carved human body parts on rough-hewn stone bases into her “Cells”, which she exhibited at the documenta IX in 1992 and in the American pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Bourgeois’s use of marble as material has led her to develop a unique and complex formal vocabulary that includes objectless biomorphous and organic, bodily forms as well as figurative, architectural motifs. Bourgeois’s special fascination with light and shadow has found its most powerful expression since the late 1980s in the subtly differentiated treatment of the carved marble surfaces, culminating in the integration of light sources into her sculptures. “Velvet Eyes” is a large marble sculpture that shows the persistence of Surrealist iconography in her late work. The eye, a recurring motif in Surrealism, served as both a symbol for the act of perception and as an allusion to female sexual anatomy, and the majority of the stone slab has been left rough while the side which peers out at the viewer has been smoothed to seem skin-like. The works fluctuate between the whimsical and the grotesque, the threatening and the nurturing, highlighting Bourgeois’ investigations of the polarities of the emotions that were her subjects. The installation also speaks to the artist’s ease with both intimate pieces and works of monumental scale, with one sculpture weighing in at 15 tons. The design of the gallery that houses these works in the Robert W. Wilson Building was constructed specifically to hold the enormous weight.
Info: MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA WAY, North Adams, Duration: 27/5/17-31/12/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-17:00 (Fall/Winter/Spring) or Sun-wed 10:00-18 & Thu-Sat 10:00-19:00 (Summer), https://massmoca.org
