Complex and FascinatingLouise Bourgeois at Proa Foundation

Pain and redemption, passion and fear dominate Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, an astounding exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911 ¿ New York, 2010) at Proa Foundation. The show explores the life and art of a key Twentieth-Century artist who, through her lucidity and capacity for introspection, found "visual equivalents" to "psychological states." These words by Philip Larratt-Smith, the curator, underscore the artist¿s more than 30 years in psychoanalysis and her more than 60 years in art, accompanying many interpretations of her work. One photograph shows Bourgeois and her knowing smile, holding firmly under her arm her 1968 sculpture of a large penis and testicles. The sculpture is titled Fillette, in the feminine. After envying and fearing it, did Bourgeois appropriate the phallus? At the time, already in her 70s, she handled it at will. "The phallus is an object onto which I project my tenderness. This work is about vulnerability and protectiveness (¿) And although I feel the phallus needs my protection, that doesn¿t mean I don¿t fear it as well¿", she said, glossing this sculpture. The famous image, by Robert Mapplethorpe, in a way summarizes the joys and shadows of this large-scale exhibition co-organized, with the support of Tenaris, with New York¿s Louise Bourgeois Studio and São Paulo's Tomie Ohtake Institute. Fragments of a life, childhood terrors, severe mandates, parallelisms in her work between sex and death, betrayals, exorcisms, vindications, nightmares, psychoanalysis as an "inspiring drive,¿ and more, in the largest exhibition of her work ever held in Latin America, where the artist's universe is revealed. "I became an artist through a family situation," Bourgeois told Donald Kuspit, the historian and critic. She was born to a bourgeois family that, among other things, was in the business of tapestry restoration. Her father procured them and her mother was in charge of the workshop; when the latter fell ill, 10-year-old Louise suspended her studies to assist her. Thanks to her talent for drawing, at the age of 12 she was assigned to outline the missing parts in the tapestries, to be followed by the weavers. "Everybody thought [my drawings] were wonderful¿ that is how I became an artist." The family wanted a son, who was late in coming, so she was given her father's name; a father who was openly a womanizer and included among his lovers the children¿s live-in English teacher. A father Louise was to revere and who ignored her, alongside an intelligent and protective mother who also provoked in her contradictory emotions. Bourgeois studied calculus and geometry at the Sorbonne and graduated with a degree in philosophy. Later, she studied art, set up a gallery, got married, had children, and started showing her paintings in 1945 in New York City, where she lived since 1938 with her husband, the historian Robert Goldwater. In 1949 she started showing sculptures, following a path of her own, outside fashionable trends. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted to her its first retrospective of a female artist's work; afterwards, recognition came as a deluge. Already in her 80s, she represented the US at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and her work was to be seen in the most exalted art stages of the world. Bourgeois would have liked to know that her art traveled to Buenos Aires, a city with more psychoanalysts per square mile than any other across the globe. The artist even prepared part of her shipment to the Southern Cone, before passing away in May of 2010. It is not a surprise that the giant Maman (1999), measuring almost 10 x 10 meters and weighing 22 tons, is traveling for the first time to Latin America. "An ode to my mother, my best friend. Like the spider, she was a weaver," the poignant Maman welcomes visitors in the lawn at Proa and anticipates a universe of dazzling shapes and disturbing meanings, as in Spider (1997), an installation depicting a spider whose legs...