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8/10/2007

Louise Bourgeois

Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, London

Solo show

Hauser & Wirth is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Louise Bourgeois, one of the most important and acclaimed artists alive today. Featuring a major new body of cast sculptures, vitrine work, gouaches and two portfolios of hand-coloured prints, Louise Bourgeois: New Work is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth and will occupy two floors of the gallery’s Colnaghi space. The exhibition can be seen alongside a major Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern, also opening in October. At the age of ninety-five, Bourgeois is celebrated as the grande dame of late modernism, a radical and deeply innovative artist whose work continues to captivate and exert great influence. Her art is fuelled by a unique introspective reality, often visualised through an exorcism of her childhood and an unflinching examination of female sexuality. Disturbing, playful, erotic and mysterious, the strength of Bourgeois’ art lies in her ability to give corporeal expression to the complex dramas of her mind.

'My work is not an illustration of anything, but rather it expresses an emotional state, good or bad.' Returning again and again to the same motifs, Bourgeois’ work has evolved an intensely personal symbolism that articulates primal themes such as motherhood, sexuality and fear of abandonment. Bourgeois uses a multiplicity of forms and materials for their different possibilities of expression. The colours of these forms and their arrangement have symbolic meaning for Bourgeois; their obsessive motifs relate to her own experiences. In the vitrine Untitled (2007) clusters of organic shapes suggestive of landscape and the human body are paired with an unidentifiable hanging object flanked by spools of yarn – the latter a metaphor for fate, the thread of life, and representative of the artist’s childhood growing up surrounded by the materials of her parents’ tapestry repair business. Typically the work brings about a reconciliation of opposites – of hard with soft, exposure with vulnerability, enigma and familiarity, trauma and optimism.

Bourgeois’ new bronze sculptures continue the processing of clothes as raw materials for her art, a practice she began in the mid-nineties when she cut and stitched the contents of her wardrobe, reconstructing the materials of her past into figurative sculptures. The new works do not consist of the garments themselves, but are bronze casts of her clothes after they have been draped and sewn. The slender nature of these sculptures recalls the personages made by the artist in the late 1940s, yet they are less architectural and more geometric than these earlier works, essentially more feminine in form. Bourgeois sees the softness, folds and femininity of these bronzes as relating to the maternal feelings of nurturing, protection and warmth. Such motherly attributes are treated sardonically, however, in Bourgeois’ gouache works in red, The Good Mother and The Hysterical Mother, which hark back to images the artist made in the 1940s after the births of her children. Their theme is a metaphor for and assertion of creativity, but it is also a statement of the need and importance of maternal protection.

Hauser & Wirth will also be exhibiting Nothing to Remember, two twenty-two page portfolios of hand-coloured prints and text executed in mixed media on music manuscript paper. It follows from an earlier book, Ode à l ‘Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), which Bourgeois made entirely out of fabric, using the linens and clothing remnants from her past. 'my Memories are moth eaten', writes Bourgeois in Nothing to Remember; 'I have taken my memories into my arms and have soothed them.’

Louise Bourgeois was born in France in 1911 and has been working in America since 1938. She studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and for a time studied with Fernand Léger. Through 2008 and 2009, Bourgeois’ Tate Modern exhibition tours to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, LAMoCA, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Major solo exhibitions include MOMA, New York (1994), the inaugural Unilever commission at Tate Modern, London (2000), the Guggenheim Bilbao (2001), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002), Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003). Bourgeois participated in Documenta 9 in 1989 and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993. She lives and works in New York.

Opening reception: Tuesday 9th October, 6 – 8 pm

Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi
15 Old Bond Street - London
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 6pm, or by appointment
Free admission

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