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Stitches
in Time. Louise Bourgeois.
6
August - 4 November 2004
The
CAC Malaga is presenting Stitches in Time, a group
of recent works by Louise Bourgeois, one of the
most influential artists of recent times. The
linking thread between these works is that of
woven cloth, which is used in the works that comprise
the exhibition. These are accompanied by a selection
of graphic works by the artist, including He disappeared
into Complete Silence (1946), her most important
group of prints and poems in which she recounts
stories of loneliness and loss.
Stitches
in Time has been curated by Frances Morris, Tate
Modern senior curator, and features
20 of Louise Bourgeois's most recent creations,
most dating from the last three years. They include
small characters, life-size sewn busts, totemic
figures and display case-cells. In all of them,
cloth acts as a material imbued with symbolism,
suggestive of her traumatic family past.
Born
in Paris in 1911 when Cubism was at its height.
Family harmony was ruptured with the arrival of
an English governess who later became her fatherıs
lover. This relationship, and in particular the
consequences it had for her mother, permanently
marked Louise Bourgeoisıs artistic career. Seven
in a Bed, 2001, for example, seems to distil the
artistıs memory of a far distant weekend mornings
when she and siblings would tumble into bed with
their parents, but the Janus-like addition of
extra heads warns us that things, specially people,
are not always what they seem.
Trained
as a painter, Bourgeois began to work in sculpture
in New York in 1938 after her marriage to the
art historian Robert Goldwater. In the late 1940s
and early 1950s, she virtually abandoned painting
and began to create a series of totemic figures
in wood whose verticality evokes the human form.
The artist has recently reinterpreted these early
works, this time in cloth, represented in the
exhibition by pieces such as Untitled 2001 and
2002.
Her
first exhibition of sculpture took place in New
York in 1949. Much later, at the age of seventy-one,
Bourgeois was the first woman artist to be given
a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. By then she had started to make a theatrical
spaces entitled Cells, representing, as she explained,
different types of pain --"the physical,
the emotional and the psychological, and the mental
and the intellectual".
Some of the most arresting of Bourgeois' recent
works are a series of extraordinary upright and
front-facing fabric heads, of which five can be
seen in the exhibition. Sewn with a crudeness
that belies their structural sophistication, they
are nevertheless uncannily lifelike - open mouths
appear moist from exhalation and their eyes apparently
focus directly on the viewer or seem to deliberately
glance away. These are difficult works to confront;
a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant
glass cases which encase them.
Stitches
in Time is completed by the series of prints What
is the shape of the problem? (1999), Topiary,
the Art of Improving Nature (1998), and He disappeared
into Complete Silence (1947). The latter is perhaps
her most important work in this field. In it,
architectural structures, some with openings resembling
balconies and windows, are juxtaposed with short
texts that relate an inexplicable tale of privation
and of lack of communication.
Louise
Bourgeois is one of the first artists to affirm
the importance of autobiography and identity as
subjects of art. Throughout her career - one that
defies a linear reading - she has shown herself
to be a sculptor of startling originality, with
a unique ability to work in different materials,
from marble and bronze to latex and cloth. Bourgeois
has thus been a pioneer in the use of installation
as a means of involving the public in the experience
of art. She has been one of the most influential
artists on contemporary art since the late 1970s,
while her continuing and tireless activity inspires
and motivates new generations of artists.
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