ExhibitionApril 8, 2022
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child
The first major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois to focus exclusively on her work using fabrics and textiles. On view at Hayward Gallery until 15 May. ‘I have always had a fascination with the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness.’
In the final two decades of her life, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) embarked on a new creative path in developing her oeuvre. During this period, she created a group of sculptures, drawings, and installations that incorporated domestic fabrics, including clothing, linens, and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history.
Bourgeois saved clothing throughout her life, including dresses and undergarments from her childhood and items that had belonged to her mother. As the daughter of tapestry restorers, the artist’s turn to textiles in her eighties could be seen as a renewed exploration of her past. At the same time, her fabric works invite us to reimagine the meanings of mending, including a concept of emotional repair that - rather than neatly sewing everything up - can expand and refresh our perspectives.
Bourgeois’s use of soft materials - including the ‘second skin’ of her own clothes - often imbues these works with a sensual quality and an almost tactile sense of vulnerability and intimacy. She saw the actions involved in fabricating them in metaphorical terms, relating the cutting, ripping, sewing, and joining to reparation notions and the bodily expression of psychic tensions. For Bourgeois, these clothes were as significant as the pages of her diary in their ability to hold the memory of people, places, events, and the touch of her own body. Many of these late works returned to, and recalibrated her earlier art’s concerns and formal strategies, exploring sexual ambiguities and harrowing psychological and social relationships.
This developed into a varied body of work – from monumental installations to figurative sculptures and abstract collages – incorporating textiles such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint. Bourgeois’s fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation central to her long oeuvre.
To accompany the opening of this exhibition, the Southbank Centre has launched a new digital guide on Bloomberg Connects.
In the final two decades of her life, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) embarked on a new creative path in developing her oeuvre. During this period, she created a group of sculptures, drawings, and installations that incorporated domestic fabrics, including clothing, linens, and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history.
Bourgeois saved clothing throughout her life, including dresses and undergarments from her childhood and items that had belonged to her mother. As the daughter of tapestry restorers, the artist’s turn to textiles in her eighties could be seen as a renewed exploration of her past. At the same time, her fabric works invite us to reimagine the meanings of mending, including a concept of emotional repair that - rather than neatly sewing everything up - can expand and refresh our perspectives.
Bourgeois’s use of soft materials - including the ‘second skin’ of her own clothes - often imbues these works with a sensual quality and an almost tactile sense of vulnerability and intimacy. She saw the actions involved in fabricating them in metaphorical terms, relating the cutting, ripping, sewing, and joining to reparation notions and the bodily expression of psychic tensions. For Bourgeois, these clothes were as significant as the pages of her diary in their ability to hold the memory of people, places, events, and the touch of her own body. Many of these late works returned to, and recalibrated her earlier art’s concerns and formal strategies, exploring sexual ambiguities and harrowing psychological and social relationships.
This developed into a varied body of work – from monumental installations to figurative sculptures and abstract collages – incorporating textiles such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint. Bourgeois’s fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation central to her long oeuvre.
To accompany the opening of this exhibition, the Southbank Centre has launched a new digital guide on Bloomberg Connects.
Gallery
