Louise Bourgeois

The main emphasis of the presentation of her work at the Museum of Cycladic Art, one of the last exhibitions organised during her lifetime, was the display of Personages, sculptures which have surrealist origins and are totem-like in appearance. Created between 1947-1953, they were originally carved in wood and intended to be produced in bronze. These life-size sculptures were designed to be seen in groups, like social groups of standing figures, in contrast with patriarchal notions of monumentality. The Personages series, a series of slender fabric columns are an outstanding contribution to the history of sculpture in the twentieth century, giving rise to the artist’s central themes and concerns that have dominated her entire body of work.

The show also included the impressive sculpture Avenza Revisited II (1968-1969). This sculpture belongs to a group of works that the artist described as representing an ‘anthropomorphic’ landscape, inspired, in that case, from Avenza, an area in Carrara, Italy, which is a region famous for its marble quarries, where Bourgeois worked in stone. In total, eight representative sculptures were displayed in the exhibition alongside with a couple of her then recent series of gouaches. Two of her vivid red gouaches reveal the artist’s preoccupation with the relationships of family, with coupling, pregnancy and child rearing.

For over seventy years she submitted her psychic life to intense examination, transforming her thoughts and emotions into a body of work of startling formal complexity. Using a vast variety of media –including wood, stone, plaster, latex, metal, fabric and found objects– she continually pushed the limits of sculpture, working at the forefront of many of the major artistic developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, whilst always remaining uniquely individual. A highly personal symbolic code runs throughout her art, generating a vocabulary of form that is at once inimitable and deeply influential.