'Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait' at MoMA
Louise Bourgeois’ work explores psychological subjects such as fear, pain, desire, and trauma, inspired by her childhood in France. Born in 1911, she had an impressively long career, culminating with her death in 2010 at the age of 98, “seven years more than Picasso had and, like him, she worked almost to the end,” as described in The New York Times.
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through January 28, 2018, explores the prints, books, and creative process of the celebrated sculptor. Bourgeois’ creative process is the organizing principle behind the exhibition. Over the course of her career, she constantly revisited the themes of her art, all of which emerged from emotions she struggled with for a lifetime.
Bourgeois’s printed oeuvre, a little-known aspect of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,200 printed compositions, created primarily in the last two decades of her life but also at the beginning of her career, in the 1940s. MoMA has a prized archive of this material, and the exhibition will highlight works from the collection along with rarely seen loans.
Bourgeois said there was no “rivalry” between the mediums in which she worked, noting that “they say the same thing in different ways.” At MoMA, her prints and illustrated books will be seen in the context of related sculptures, drawings, and paintings, and within thematic groupings that explore motifs of architecture, the body, and nature, as well as investigations of abstraction and works made from old garments and household fabrics.
Bringing together some 300 works, the exhibition celebrates MoMA’s archive of Bourgeois prints as well as the completion of the online catalogue raisonné, Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books.
Learn more about Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, on view at MoMA through January 28
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