|
|
Louise Bourgeois, Couple IV, 1997, Fabric, leather, stainless steel and plastic, 20 x 65 x 30 1/2”, Wood and glass Victorian vitrine: 72 x 82 x 43”, Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Christopher Burke, © Louise Bourgeois. |
|
Louise Bourgeois, Confrontation, 1978, Painted wood, latex, and fabric, 86 5/8 x 368 1/8 x 175 9/16", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, © Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I, 1968, Marble, wood plinth, 20 1/16 x 50 x 48 1/16", Fonds National d’art contemporain, Attribution au Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou en 1976, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, © Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois, Pink Days and Blue Days, 1997, Steel, fabric, bone, wood, glass, rubber and mixed media, Overall: 117 x 87 x 87", Whitney Museum of American Art, 97.101a-s, © Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947, Ink and pencil on paper, 9 15/16 x 7 1/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, © Louise Bourgeois. |
Guggenheim Museum Louise Bourgeois, a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time, will be fill entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and an adjacent gallery at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, making it the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career.presented. The exhibition is organized by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, and immigrated to New York in 1938. One of the leading figures in 20th and 21st-century art, she has influenced multiple generations of artists with her unique and ever-evolving talent to wed form and narrative content. This ambitious retrospective will encompass over 150 of the artist’s drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and installations, providing an unprecedented opportunity to assess her richly complex oeuvre. The Guggenheim Museum is deeply committed to Bourgeois’s art, and in 1991 acquired an in-depth selection of her work representing the span of her career to date. An important room-sized installation from the museum’s permanent collection, Confrontation, 1978, will be displayed in the Tower 5 gallery. Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the visual arts for more than seventy years, continuing to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, Bourgeois has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that powerfully articulates the psychological imperatives behind her artistic process. What unifies Bourgeois’s myriad drawings, environmental-scale installations filled with found objects, and sculptural essays in wood, marble, metal, plaster or latex, is an intense emotional substance that at once exposes facets of her own personal history and confronts the more universal ethos of being human. Present throughout her work is a fusion of seeming opposites, a deliberate dismantling of dualistic thought, which rends male from female, order from chaos, pleasure from pain. In many of her anthropomorphic sculptures, Bourgeois merges corporeal elements from each of the genders to create ambiguous but nevertheless complete entities. The tension between diametrically opposed emotional states—aggression and impotence, desire and rejection, terror and fortitude—is given palpable form in her late, room-like sculptures known as Cells and the more recent body of work comprising sewn figures that represent pivotal moments in the cycle of life. Louise Bourgeois will encompass representative selections from all of the major phases of the artist’s career. Visitors will be greeted in the museum’s rotunda by one of Bourgeois’ iconic spider sculptures, Spider Couple, 2003, and a pair of hanging aluminum works dating from 2004 that draw on another of her signature motifs, the spiral. Appropriately, this recurring form in the artist’s iconography will find a corollary in the unique structure of the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramps, on which the works will be arranged along predominantly chronological lines. Throughout the exhibition, the works on paper that are an integral and constant element of Bourgeois’ creative process will be juxtaposed with her sculptural works. The main body of the exhibition will begin with paintings and drawings dating from the mid-1940s that depict female bodies half eclipsed in architectural structures – a vision of the “femme maison” whose identity is literally subsumed by the responsibilities and constrictions of the domestic role. These works will be interspersed by an installation of Bourgeois’ Personnages in the High Gallery. These anthropomorphic wooden totems, created as surrogates for the artist’s former life in France, will be placed in staggered relational groupings, echoing their original installation in a series of solo exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in New York between 1949 and 1953. Continuing up the ramps, the transitional multi-part sculpture The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-49, will introduce smaller groupings of Personnages. These slightly later works diverge from monolithic rigidity in favor of multiple segments threaded onto a central rod, such as Femme Volage, 1951, or the stacked columns of blocks that characterize Memling Dawn, 1951. Around 1960 Bourgeois began to exploit the sculptural possibilities of a new repertoire of malleable materials such as plaster, latex, and resin, creating amorphous organic forms that evoke the human body and natural topographies. Works in this section of the exhibition such as Lair, 1962, and Fée Couturière, 1963, present roughly textured enclosed structures, suggesting both protective nests and sinister traps. This characteristic ambiguity of reference is extended in the limp, indeterminate biomorphic forms of such seminal works as Janus Fleuri, 1968 and Filette, 1968, as well as in Bourgeois’ first major environmental sculpture, The Destruction of the Father, 1974 – a grisly evocation of a cannibalistic family meal. The exhibition will continue with a broad selection of sculptures executed primarily in marble and bronze, in which the pliable softness of Bourgeois’ formal vocabulary is offset by the hard inflexibility of these traditional mediums. Many of these works are abstractions formed from the smooth, globular protuberances that the artist refers to as Cumuls (“clouds”). Others, such as the hanging bronze, Arch of Hysteria, 1993, render anatomical form with a new verisimilitude. An adjacent gallery will be devoted to displaying Confrontation, 1978 – a tableaux of latex forms ringed by wooden barriers that will be shown alongside archival footage of the performance that accompanied the piece when it was first exhibited. The museum’s final ramps will be devoted primarily to Bourgeois’ Cells – the large-scale enclosed installations that the artist produced throughout the 1990s. Incorporating both found objects and created sculptures within structures that are simultaneously claustrophobic prisons and shielding cloisters, these complex assemblages are vessels for deeply autobiographical, psychological narratives. The exhibition will culminate with a selection of recent fabric-based sculptures. In these unsettling works, stuffed heads, torsos and intertwined figures – some of which are stitched from the Bourgeois’ own clothes and household linens – enact a primal drama of sexual and familial relationships. |
Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-1949, Wood, painted pink, 70 3/8 x 96 7/8 x 17 3/8”, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, © Louise Bourgeois. |
|
Louise Bourgeois photographed by Brassai at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris in 1937, Photo: Louise Bourgeois Archive. |
|
Guggenheim Museum 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. 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 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. |
Louise Bourgeois working on her mixed media sculpture entitled Confrontation in 1978, Photo: Inge Morath.
Louise Bourgeois in 2003, Photo: Nanda Lanfranco. |
Louise Bourgeois in the studio of her apartment at 142 East 18th Street in New York, circa 1946, Photo: Louise Bourgeois Archive. |
|
Catherine Opie, Joanne, Betsy, & Olivia, Bayside, New York, 1998, Chromogenic print, 40 x 50", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
|
Catherine Opie, Oliver in a Tutu, 2004, Chromogenic print, 24 x 20", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 2006, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Frankie, 1995, Chromogenic print, 20 x 16", Edition of 8, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Self Portrait / Nursing, 2004, Chromogenic print, 40 x 32", Edition 7 of 8, 2 APs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members, 2005, Image opyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
Guggenheim Museum Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms by which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects. Catherine Opie: American Photographer is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography; with Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator Catherine Opie: American Photographer will gather together significant examples from several of Opie’s most important series in a major mid-career survey. Though Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan — including one-person exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Artpace, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; St. Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London—no single exhibition has yet offered an overview of her richly diverse artistic project. Catherine Opie: American Photographer will serve to fill this void. Opie first came to prominence with her Portraits series (1993–97), which celebrates the queer community in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including practitioners of drag, transgendered people, and performance artists. Set against brilliantly colored backgrounds, these figures confront the viewer with intense gazes, asserting their individuality and destabilizing conventional notions of gender. Opie describes these sitters, all of whom she knew personally, as her “royal family”; by adopting a style inspired by portraitists like the 16th-century German painter Hans Holbein, she offers an affirmative and even tender portrayal of a subculture often rendered invisible by dominant cultural norms. Concurrently with the Portraits, in the mid-1990s Opie began to photograph urban landscapes throughout Los Angeles. Her first city series, Freeways (1994-95), pictures the city’s highways devoid of human presence, their sweeping slabs of concrete set against the sky. Nearly abstract and printed on an intimate scale, these photographs are nonetheless analogous to Opie’s portraits in their majesty. As documents of a primary aspect of daily travel in Los Angeles, the Freeways suggest that the strategies and structures intended to connect people can in fact divide them. The Houses series (1995) continued Opie’s urban exploration through crisp, frontal views of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions that, like the Freeways, appear devoid of human presence. Yet each pristine façade retains as distinct a character as each of the friends Opie portrays— these houses structure and signify the community within which their occupants exist. Symbols of the archetypal “American Dream,” they are nonetheless armed with complex security systems, massive doors, and ornate gates, marking an entirely separate community, one closed off to the artist, the viewer, and the rest of the surrounding city. Opie’s interests in portraiture and domestic architecture continued to develop, and began to merge, in her series Domestic (1995-98). Produced during a three-month trip across the country, these large-scale, color photographs document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities, in settings varying from city apartments to country homes. Repositioning these unconventional families within the iconography of the classic American home, Opie envisions a more inclusive, complex image of the contemporary family. More recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in the series In and Around Home (2004–05), in which she photographs her own family and friends amidst the diverse cultural setting of her Los Angeles neighborhood. Following the Freeways, Opie has continued to investigate the ways communities form and display themselves within urban settings, in an extended series of panoramic black-and-white photographs called American Cities (1997-present). Exploring the urban environments of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others, Opie reveals the variety of communities that exist within each city. For example, the Mini-Malls, the group of photographs that initiated American Cities, focuses insistently on the billboards, signs, and architectural elements that identify various ethnic and cultural groups in each eponymous setting. Characteristically, all the series’ photographs are emptied of human presence. With their romantic purity, each of the American Cities becomes an iconic, ideal platform for potential community interaction. Ever seeking to diversify her artistic work, Opie has also turned away from the city, looking toward nature and the itinerant communities that exist upon it. In Icehouses (2001), she turns to the brightly painted structures built by ice fishers on frozen lakes in Minnesota. Viewed from afar, surrounded by an infinite vista of misty snow and atmosphere, the patchy assemblage of icehouses seems diminutive and immaterial. Similarly, the subjects of Surfers (2003) are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, where they watch and wait to be swept up by oncoming waves. Picturing their changing positions over the course of 14 photographs, Opie presents a rich visual metaphor for the shifting and contingent nature of community itself, as it exists in any environment. Catherine Opie: American Photographer is accompanied by a major publication, the first to gather all of Opie’s various projects in one volume. Each of the artist’s series are reproduced in full color plates made under the artist’s supervision, including works beyond those displayed in the exhibition, in order to give the most complete overview of Opie’s work ever available. The catalogue features a lead essay by Jennifer Blessing, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Photography, which surveys Opie’s artistic career and its historical contexts, as well as a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson. Tthe museum has also commissioned a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores concerns similar to Opie’s. Finally, the catalogue includes introductory essays on each of the artist’s series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography. Together, the exhibition and catalogue will prove to be the primary source for an understanding of Opie’s work, providing audiences with a valuable opportunity to examine firsthand the interconnections between the artists’ various styles and subjects. |
Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 from Mini-mall series, 1997, IRIS print, 16 x 41", Edition of 5, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
