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Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993, Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece, Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Galerie Hauser & Wirth, © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Allan Finkelman.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1996, Fabric, lace and thread, Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Galerie Hauser& Wirth, © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Peter Bellamy.

Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947, ink on paper, 9-15/16 x 7-1/8 in., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photo by Eeva Inkeri, © Louise Bourgeois.

Tate Modern
Bankside
+44 20 7887 8888
London
Level 4
Louise Bourgeois
October 11-
January 20, 2008

Louise Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career has engaged both modern and traditional techniques, exploring various themes in a range of styles, from abstraction to the ready-made. With over 150 works dating between 1938 and 2008, the exhibition includes the artist’s earliest paintings and works on paper; sculptures made in a variety of materials, including wood, steel, plaster, latex, marble, and bronze; large-scale installations from the 1980s and ’90s; a broad selection of drawings and prints from throughout her career; small-scale hand-made objects; and her most recent works, which utilize fabric. This unique, must-see presentation also reunites many of Bourgeois’s most well-known pieces, including The Blind Leading the Blind (1947-49), Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99), and a number of her powerful Cell installations, such as Cell (Choisy) (1990-93), Cell (You’d Better Grow Up) (1993), Red Room (Child) (1994), Red Room (Parents) (1994), and Spider (1997). Louise Bourgeois is an opportunity to discover the artist’s most important works and explore the core themes that unite them across media.

Louise Bourgeois, the exhibition, spans seven decades of varied and prolific artistic output ranging from small scale experimental works to large scale installations from the 1980s and 1990s.

Bourgeois has said that her childhood, which was rich with both craft and symbolism, is the source all of her artwork and its themes. Born to a family of weavers, Bourgeois spent her early years surrounded by fabrics and textiles, as she played an active role in her family’s business of repairing and restoring tapestries. Sewing needles signified restoration for Bourgeois, as she witnessed her mother’s constant efforts at conservation and repair; hence, a number of the artist’s large-scale sculptures take the form of needles, evoking both the psychological and physical symbolism of the device and its magic power. The spider, itself a weaver and repairer, is another highly charged figure that appears frequently in Bourgeois’s work. Other themes favored by Bourgeois include maternity, the couple, childhood, the body, sexuality, gender, and autobiography.

Born in Paris, Louise Bourgeois studied under Léger in the 1930s before moving to New York in 1938. Her first exhibition of sculptures was held in New York in 1949. Her 1982 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the museum’s first ever retrospective of a female artist, revealing a sculptor of immense distinction working with a complex variety of materials which included marble, bronze, latex, fabric and mirrors. In 2000, her vast installation, I Do, I Undo, I Redo, was the first commission in The Unilever Series for Tate Modern.

The exhibition is curated by Frances Morris, Head of Collections (International Art) Tate Modern, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Curator, Louvre and Jonas Storsve, Curator, Centre Pompidou, with assistance from Ann Coxon, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. It is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition will tour to Centre Pompidou in Spring 2008, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York in Summer 2008,Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Autumn 2008 and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. in Spring 2009.

It will be accompanied by an ambitious publication providing an overview of Bourgeois, not only as an influential creator of sculpture, installation, drawing and printmaking but also as a writer, critic and diarist. It will include items from 39 contributors and unpublished material by Bourgeois. The catalogue will also feature an illustrated biography as well as a full chronology.

Louise Bourgeois working on her mixed media sculpture entitled Confrontation in 1978, Photo: Inge Morath.

Louise Bourgeois in 2003, Photo: Nanda Lanfranco.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York
212-423-3500
A Life in Pictures:
Louise Bourgeois
June 27-September 12, 2008

For Louise Bourgeois, art and life are inextricably linked. Although her complex, allusive work attains universal significance, she has spoken of the autobiographical subtext that underpins her symbolic language. A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois is an opportunity to trace the personal narratives that have informed the artist’s work for the past seven decades of her career. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in provincial France, helping with the family’s tapestry restoration business before immigrating to New York in 1938. “Everything I do,” she has explained, “was inspired by my early life.” Viscerally present in her art is the psychic trauma of her mother’s early death, her father’s betrayal of the family with his 10-year affair with their live-in English tutor, and her overlapping roles of student, daughter, wife, mother and artist.

A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois, an exhibition of photographs, diaries, and ephemera from the artist’s personal archive is unique to the Guggenheim’s presentation of the retrospective Louise Bourgeois organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois is organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Museum.

A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois illuminates the artist’s rich life and career through a chronological display of over 75 photographs taken by her family and fellow artists and friends such as Brassaï, Peter Moore, Inge Morath, and Baird Jones. Snapshots of Bourgeois — in France as a child, in her studio among iconic works, at home at her famed Sunday salons, or in the company of great artists — are shown alongside identification cards and passports. The artist’s original diaries, which she has kept assiduously since 1923, offer poems, sketches and daily musings, and often indicate tensions between rage, fear of abandonment, and guilt she has suffered since childhood — tensions, however, that she has channeled and released through her art. Included in the presentation are 10 original invitations dating from 1945 to 1978, announcing some of Bourgeois’s New York exhibitions. These selections from the artist’s archive put into context the more than 150 works on view in the retrospective, such as Bourgeois’s early Femme Maison drawings and paintings of the 1940s, through the large-scale enclosed installations created in the 1990s known as Cells, to recent soft sculptures created from stitched fabric.

Louse Bourgeois, Spider, 1996, Cast-bronze, Collection of Barbara Lee, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Louise Bourgeois, Arched Figure No. 1, 1997, Collection of Barbara Lee, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York, Photograph Christopher Burke.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Hands and Mirror), 1995, Collection Barbara Lee, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York, Photograph Peter Bellamy.

Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
100 Northern Avenue
Boston
617-478-3100
East Gallery
Bourgeois in Boston
March 26, 2007-March 2, 2008

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston presents a new exhibition of sculptures, prints, and drawings by Louise Bourgeois, one of todays most important and influential living artist. Bourgeois in Boston brings together works from area collections, both public and private, creating a uniquely located portrait of the artist. This long-term exhibition will include works spanning her entire career, presenting Bourgeois's varied styles and powerful themes.

"Bourgeois in Boston shows the depth and breadth of a body of work by one the leading artists of our time," says Jill Medvedow, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. "Her presence in Boston-area collections represents her considerable influence on contemporary art over several decades."

Bourgeois in Boston includes sculptures, prints, and drawings from area museums including the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, as well as local private collections. The heart of the exhibition will be a substantial group of Bourgeois works owned by Boston philanthropic activist and ICA Trustee Barbara Lee. Lee is a great champion of women artists with a particular interest in sculpture and has collected work from the earliest part of Bourgeois's career through the late 1990s. The works demonstrate the artist's use of diverse materials — wood, marble, bronze, rubber — and illustrate the stages of Bourgeois' career as well as the common threads that link her work past and present.

Louise Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York with her husband Robert Goldwater in 1938, and she has made her home there ever since. Though she began as an engraver and painter, she turned to sculpture in the 1940s. Her first one-person exhibition was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, in 1945. Sixty years later, she continues to produce new work and break artistic ground, and is regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest artists. Bourgeois is known for her emotionally-charged sculptures and drawings, drawn from childhood memories and present-day dreams.

"Bourgeois's works are highly symbolic objects of desire, sexuality, beauty, and anxiety," says Emily Moore Brouillet, Assistant Curator at the ICA. "Her forms evoke past memories or emotions, but are ultimately open-ended."

The exhibition includes Untitled (1947-49), a painted wood piece from one of the artist's first bodies of work. As is typical of Bourgeois, the white carved column plays with abstraction and figuration; the pillar has an indentation where a person's navel might be, and the bulbous growths at the top might be interpreted as teeth, breasts, or facial features. Germinal (1967-92), a white marble piece with mysterious outgrowths, and Janus Fleuri, a hanging bronze from 1968, are similarly anthropomorphic, yet ambiguous. The more recent Cell (Hand and Mirror), (1995), a work from Bourgeois's Cell series of the late 1980s and 1990s, features exquisitely-carved marble hands set in the center of a room-like space made from found doors. A series of mirrors gives viewers multiple views of the cell's interior, allowing visual access to a space they can not physically enter.

Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911in Paris, where she studied at various art schools, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and with Fernand Léger. She continued her studies in the United States at the Art Students League in New York. Bourgeois began to draw attention with her sculpture in the 1940s and was very active on the New York art scene, but it was not until the late 1970s that she achieved true fame. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art organized a major retrospective exhibition entitled Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective.

Bourgeois has had recent exhibitions at Dia: Beacon, Beacon, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy; and the Tate Gallery, London.