LOUISE BOURGEOIS at Hauser & Wirth Zürich until 26th July
Posted on June 6, 2008 at 1:49 PM.
Louise Bourgeois (b.1911, Paris) is widely recognised as one of the most important artists working today. She has, over her long career, worked through most of the twentieth century's avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism. Yet, Bourgeouis has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive and at the forefront of contemporary art.
A metaphor for memory, for a life looked back upon, Bourgeois' exhibition La Rivière Gentille (2007) is an astonishingly beautiful series on paper that wraps its way in three tiers around the upstairs gallery of Hauser & Wirth in Zürich. Consisting of 42 mixed media sheets, each almost a metre long, the series interweaves imagery and phrases from a text the artist wrote in the mid-'60s which documents her childhood in France.
Louise Bourgeois' moments of ecstasy, vivid incidents and dark passages are recollected in a liquid palette of blue, red and black, which snakes its way across each individual sheet. She dwells upon sensate experience - the physical world of things and the pleasure they bring - whilst summoning the inexorable, onward flow of existence.
Bourgeois has lived near a river her entire life, and this played a crucial role in her childhood. The high tannin levels of the water was needed for the family's business of tapestry restoration. She also remembers the dyed skeins drying in the trees and the colours of the flowers that her parents planted along the river's bank.
As with all of Bourgeois's imagery, there is contradiction. Water can be a metaphor for the origins of life, the passing of time and reverie, however it also stands for destruction, the black well of depression, and a place to commit suicide. Bourgeois' images of rivers are like the umbilical cord that ties her to her mother an the river acts like an unbroken thread that weaves the past and present together.
The Tate Modern conducted an extensive retrospective of her work last year (10 October 2007 - 20 January 2008), which has then travelled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris (5 March - 2 June 2008), to proceed to the Guggenheim Museum, New York (27 June - 28 September 2008), LAMoCA, Los Angeles (25 October 2008 - 25 January 2009) and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (26 February - 17 May 2009). There will be a solo show of Bourgeois's work taking place this October at the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.
Image: Louise Bourgeois. La Rivière Gentille
Installation view at hauser & Wirth Zürich 2008
1 June - 26 July 20
Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
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