The Museum of Modern Art announces the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, on view September 24, 2017, through January 28, 2018, is the first comprehensive survey of Bourgeois' prints and illustrated books. It places these mediums within the context of the artist's overall practice and sheds new light on her creative process. The exhibition includes 265 prints (including those in books and series), 23 sculptures, nine drawings, and two early paintings. Louise Bourgeois is organized by Deborah Wye, Chief Curator Emerita of the former Department of Prints and Illustrated Books—a longtime friend of the artist's and a leading scholar of her work—with Sewon Kang, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints. "Her prints and their evolving states of development are especially revealing as they provide the opportunity to see Bourgeois' imagination unfold," says exhibition curator Deborah Wye. "To view such sequences is akin to looking over the artist's shoulder as she worked." The entire body of Bourgeois' printmaking comprises some 1,200 individual compositions, and constitutes a major component of her work overall. She created prints in two periods of her career. In the 1940s, she was an active printmaker and painter; she transitioned to sculpture only late in the decade. When Bourgeois turned definitively to sculpture, she left painting behind, but returned to printmaking many decades later, in the late 1980s. During the 1990s and 2000s—when Bourgeois was in her eighties and nineties— she made prints a part of her daily practice. She resurrected her old printing press from the 1940s, and eventually added a second, both located on the lower level of her home/studio. The thematic sections of this exhibition bring together prints from both periods of Bourgeois' engagement with the medium. The exhibition also features a film clip from Louise Bourgeois: La Rivière Gentille, showing Bourgeois with Ode à l'Oubli, a fabric book she made in 2002, with pages made from monogrammed linen hand towels saved from her trousseau. (She married in 1938.) She filled this book with fabric collages made from bits and pieces of her old garments; stains, scorches, and cigarette burns testify to their histories. Bourgeois Archive at MoMA and Online Catalogue Raisonné In 1990, Louise Bourgeois promised an archive of her printed art to the Museum, consisting of all the prints and illustrated books in her possession at that time, and the promise of an example of each new print going forward. MoMA now has in its collection some 3,000 printed sheets by the artist, a unique resource for the study and understanding of her artistic vision and creative process. This vast archive of Bourgeois's prints, as well as all others she created in the medium, is now accessible online through the highly innovative, interactive website Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books (moma.org/bourgeoisprints). For more information visit: www.moma.org