My Own Voice Wakes Me Up: A Retrospective For Louise Bourgeois

Description

“Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” – Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is considered to be one of the most important and influential artists of the last century.

Bourgeois left an enduring body of work that merged the concrete reality of the world around her and the fantastic reality of her inner psychic landscape. Her creative process was often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre – which encompasses a variety of genres, media and materials – plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

The exhibition My Own Voice Wakes Me Up takes its title from one of Bourgeois’s writings and focuses on distinct bodies of work from the final two decades of the French-American artist’s life. Works on show include fabric sculptures, hand poses, red gouaches, experimental large-format prints, topiary sculptures, and rarely exhibited holograms. The exhibition is curated by Bourgeois’ friend and assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, who worked closely with the artist from the early 1980s until her death in 2010.