LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Woven together with numerous autobiographical elements, Louise Bourgeois’ work bears witness to a close relationship between memory and recollection that wavers, fades and stretches thin. The sculptor, who used to say, “painting doesn’t exist for me”, has nevertheless always been strongly attached to the engraved or drawn image. She recorded in her diaries the visual ideas that appeared to her and which, in her own words, she caught like flies in flight. Like her sculptures, with their shapeless, organic materials, her engraved work explores the ambiguity of the forms issuing from her fantasy-laced memories. She collects, skins, deconstructs, models and assembles. This interplay of back and forth, conducive to the engraver’s art, is particularly evident in her ‘Sainte Sébastienne’, a feminine reinterpretation of the figure of the famous martyr pierced by arrows. In 1990, Bourgeois began the first version and would return to it several times, cropping the image, even using photocopying to develop her composition and/or transfer it to a copper plate. Born in France in 1911 and deceased in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Discovered late, her work, which eludes any artistic classification, has been the subject of major exhibitions and retrospectives around the world over the last 30 years. Her work was first presented in France in 1985 by Galerie Lelong. In 2000, Galerie Lelong & Co. published a volume of writings and interviews by Louise Bourgeois entitled, ‘Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father’.