Louise Bourgeois. Extrême tension
"Presented by Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, an exhibition dedicated to the graphic work of Louise Bourgeois will bring together the two institutions’ collections for the first time. It is also the first exhibition dedicated to the artist in a Parisian public institution since 2008.
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In the centre of the exhibition, the monumental Extreme Tension (2007) combines print, drawing and handwriting. The 11 large sheets deliver a poignant testimony on the ageing body, pain and existential anxiety. In direct resonance, the huge plates of Turning Inwards (2007) are presented to a French audience for the first time."
Louise Bourgeois, Altered states, 1992. Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Jean-Claude Planchet/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn, © The Easton Foundation/Adagp, Paris
"Organized with the Easton Foundation, this two-floor exhibition focuses on Bourgeois’s defining work of the 1960s, a turning point in her practice. Featuring sculptures on the first floor and drawings on the fourth, the exhibition traces the emergence of a formal and symbolic vocabulary fundamental to her art: the fragmented body, the ambiguous sexual object, the repeated organic form, conceived as iterative and subject to transformation."
Louise Bourgeois, Germinal, 1967-88. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation/ARS, NY
"'Every day,' Louise Bourgeois said, “you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” For her, making art entails trying to translate experience into form—an operation that she compares with exorcism. In Bourgeois’s works on view in these galleries, organic formations fuse with the inorganic materiality of the media in which they are rendered, be it marble, wood, or bronze…"
Louise Bourgeois, Crouching Spider, 2003. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation/ARS, NY