LOUISE BOURGEOIS

In K3, fabric suites and works on paper have been wrapped around the four walls of the room to create an immersive environment. The suite 10 AM Is When You Come To Me (2006) scores the moments of Bourgeois’s working relationship with her longtime assistant Jerry Gorovoy through variations of their hands in red gouache. The fabric suite Hours of the Day (2006), in which a clock face for every hour is paired with excerpts from her writings, offers a philosophical meditation on time, memory, and emotion. The lower portion of the walls is hung with a selection of late gouaches and watercolors foregrounding the motifs that preoccupied Bourgeois in her later years: the self-portrait, the couple, the mother and child, the good mother, the family, the landscape, and the spiral.

The center of the gallery space is populated by three major sculptures. Untitled (No. 5) (1998) memorializes Bourgeois’s emotional bond with Gorovoy in monumental form, their posed hands rendered in the pink marble she favored because it reminded her of flesh. In Fountain (1999), two streams of water wind down around two spiral mounds before merging in a single stream. The mounds make a figure eight, the symbol of infinity, while the unending flow of the water signifies the passage of time. In The Couple (2007–2009), a man and a woman are wrapped together in a spiral that emanates out of the woman’s hair. Suspended in a close embrace, they will not be separated again.

The Hanok space features a series of drawings on coffee filters made by Bourgeois in 1994 and exhibited here for only the second time. These compositions are unusual for Bourgeois in having a circular format, which may have unconsciously suggested to the artist the face of a clock. As so often in Bourgeois’s work, the prevailing iconography hovers between abstract and organic—biomorphic shapes and stains that suggest the natural world and sometimes even landscapes; and sharp-edged geometric forms and a graphic quality that in some ways anticipate the fabric drawings of the 2000s, in which circular compositions radiate outwards from their centers to intersect with other circles. The use of an everyday, domestic coffee filter as drawing paper imbues these intimate works with a diaristic and experimental feel.