Recently the art of Louise Bourgeois was exhibited at the museum of modern art in New York. Here, her work on the issue of patriarchy, sexuality and womanhood was in focus.
Bourgeois Louis
Louise Bourgeois’s work, which spanned most of the twentieth century, was heavily influenced by traumatic psychological events from her childhood, particularly her father’s infidelity. Bourgeois’s often brooding and sexually explicit subject matter and her focus on three-dimensional form were rare for women artists at the time. . (Louise Bourgeois,French-American Sculptor).
Self-Portrait (1990) This self portrait of Louise Bourgeois containing the textures, atmospheres and traumas of her childhood in the haunting. Photograph: Robert Gerhardt/The Easton Foundation/VAGA
Sainte Sebastienne (1990) Bourgeois feminizes Sebastian, turning this figure of pain into a woman, implicitly identifying with Sebastienne’s suffering. Spider Woman (2004) In 2000, at nearly 90, she leapt from being a cult figure for feminist artists to a household name when her colossal sculptures opened the new Tate Modern museum. Ever since, her giant spider Maman has been her answer to Dalí’s melting watches or Warhol’s Marilyns – an icon of our time. Photograph: The Easton Foundation/VAGA
Femme (2006) Bourgeois creates a troubling dream image just by extending this watchful woman’s hair into spindly protrusions like the legs of some fantastic arachnid. Her own later art revived it for the 21st century, invading the contemporary mind like a starburst of mad hair.
. Lacs de Montagne (1997) The mountains that spread over a pleasant lakeside landscape resemble gigantic cuts of raw steak. Their red and white marbling is unmistakably redolent of the butcher’s shop. There is no peace in these mountains. The earth is a mirror of our restless flesh.Spiral Woman (2003) The rediscovery of Bourgeois in the late 20th century had a lot to do with a fascination with the human body that swept art in the wake of the Aids crisis . It is a body at once tortured and liberated, a nightmare and a transfiguration. And they call her twisted. Photograph: Robert Gerhardt/The Easton Foundation/VAGA
Spider (1997) She constructs enclosed spaces in which fragmented images evoke secret histories of pain and desire.
