louise bourgeois 1911 – 2010 - hauser &...

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With deep sadness, Hauser & Wirth join the Bourgeois family, Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy Williams in mourning the passing of Louise Bourgeois on 31 May 2010. Louise Bourgeois's subject was always her life and experiences. 'Art', she once said, 'is the experiencing – or rather the re-experiencing – of a trauma'. She pioneered a new kind of art in which a multiplicity of forms and materials are used to excite and to exorcise emotions. Through recurrent motifs – body parts, houses, spiders, and skeins of thread, dramatic use of colours and a vast variety of media, Bourgeois developed a deeply potent, personal symbolic code. She was an original thinker who was always at the forefront of new artistic developments yet never directly affiliated with the avant-garde movements of her time. Rather than pursue formalist concerns for their own sake, she experimented to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining such diverse materials as fabric, plaster, latex and bronze with an endless repertoire of found objects. Her 'environments' of the 1950s foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre came to artistic prominence. Through her innovative approach to media and her feminist stance she created a body of work whose distinctive and sensual treatment of forms has proved a major influence to younger generations of artists. Fiercely intelligent and independent, Bourgeois was also a generous person, unstinting in her advice and encouragement to others and an inspiration to all those who knew her. Bourgeois was born in the outskirts of Paris on 25 December 1911, three years before the outbreak of the First World War. At the age of eight she held the role of designer in her parents' tapestry repair company, re-drawing the designs of the textiles where they had worn through. She studied in Paris at the École du Louvre before relocating to the United States in 1938 with her husband Robert Goldwater. It was from the 1950s onwards when Bourgeois – a wife, mother and émigré in America – began her prolific artistic output. 'Eccentric Abstraction', an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard at New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966, brought her work to critical and public attention. Major breakthroughs on the international scene came with the 1982 retrospective of her work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her participation in LOUISE BOURGEOIS 1911 – 2010

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Page 1: LOUISE BOURGEOIS 1911 – 2010 - Hauser & Wirthcloud.hauserwirth.com/.../bourgeois-5KRUkr.pdf · With deep sadness, Hauser & Wirth join the Bourgeois family, Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy

With deep sadness, Hauser & Wirth join the Bourgeois family, Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy Williams in mourning the passing of Louise Bourgeois on 31 May 2010.

Louise Bourgeois's subject was always her life and experiences. 'Art', she once said, 'is the experiencing – or rather the re-experiencing – of a trauma'. She pioneered a new kind of art in which a multiplicity of forms and materials are used to excite and to exorcise emotions. Through recurrent motifs – body parts, houses, spiders, and skeins of thread, dramatic use of colours and a vast variety of media, Bourgeois developed a deeply potent, personal symbolic code. She was an original thinker who was always at the forefront of new artistic developments yet never directly affiliated with the avant-garde movements of her time. Rather than pursue formalist concerns for their own sake, she experimented to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining such diverse materials as fabric, plaster, latex and bronze with an endless repertoire of found objects. Her 'environments' of the 1950s foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre came to artistic prominence.

Through her innovative approach to media and her feminist stance she created a body of work whose distinctive and sensual treatment of forms has proved a major influence to younger generations of artists. Fiercely intelligent and independent, Bourgeois was also a generous person, unstinting in her advice and encouragement to others and an inspiration to all those who knew her.

Bourgeois was born in the outskirts of Paris on 25 December 1911, three years before the outbreak of the First World War. At the age of eight she held the role of designer in her parents' tapestry repair company, re-drawing the designs of the textiles where they had worn through. She studied in Paris at the École du Louvre before relocating to the United States in 1938 with her husband Robert Goldwater. It was from the 1950s onwards when Bourgeois – a wife, mother and émigré in America – began her prolific artistic output. 'Eccentric Abstraction', an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard at New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966, brought her work to critical and public attention. Major breakthroughs on the international scene came with the 1982 retrospective of her work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her participation in

LOUISE BOURGEOIS1911 – 2010

Page 2: LOUISE BOURGEOIS 1911 – 2010 - Hauser & Wirthcloud.hauserwirth.com/.../bourgeois-5KRUkr.pdf · With deep sadness, Hauser & Wirth join the Bourgeois family, Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy

documenta IX in 1992 and representing America at the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 2001 she was the first artist commissioned to fill the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. A major retrospective that opened at Tate Modern in 2007 and toured through 2008 – 2009 to Centre Pompidou, Paris, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. consolidated her reputation as the grande dame of late Modernism, one of the most important and visionary artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A solo exhibition of Bourgeois's work is currently on view at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens until 12 September, as well as 'Louise Bourgeois/Hans Bellmer – Double Sexus' at Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Berlin until 15 August. A major

Full Caption and Courtesy Information:

Louise Bourgeois with EYE TO EYE (1970), 1990 Photo: Raimon Ramis

ARCH OF HYSTERIA, 1993Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece83.8 x 101.6 x 58.4 cm / 33 x 40 x 23 inCourtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Karsten GrevePhoto: Allan Finkelman

UNTITLED2005Fabric41.2 x 53.9 cm / 16 1/4 x 21 1/4 inCourtesy Hauser & WirthPhoto: Christopher Burke

MAMAN, 1999Steel and marble927.1 x 891.5 x 1023.6 cm / 365 x 351 x 403 inCollection Tate Modern, LondonPhoto: Marcus Leith

exhibition of Bourgeois's fabric drawings and large-scale sculptures will be on view at the Fondazione Vedova in Venice from 5 June. This exhibition will travel to Hauser & Wirth London, opening on 14 October.

Bourgeois continued making work until just a few days before her death. She is remembered with great admiration and fondness and will be deeply missed by all who knew her and her art.