Louise Bourgeois is the real thing. While all around in London during the week of the Freize Art Fair we've been treated to the latest, loudest, louchest art world experiences, the new Bourgeois retrospective is a must-see show. Here is work of the utmost imagination, intimacy and bravery. Bourgeois is 95, and she's still creating great work. Will Damien Hirst still be pickling sharks at the same age?
The picture shows 'Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece. Courtesy Cheim and Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth. Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum'.
Bourgeois lengthy career spans seven decades: she was born in Paris in 1911, moving to New York in 1938 where she still lives and works. Over these momentous years, she's been associated with many of the big art movements, such as surrealism and abstract expressionism, but still, her work crosses boundaries, defies categorisation and makes it's own definitions.
This work is really personal. The early years in France were spent making paintings, prints and small wooden/mixed media about a life that was even then spelt out to others in very politicised terms. It's so much about the interior, about a dream world, about feminism before anyone else really put that vision into the plastic world of three dimensional art.
Room one in the Tate show is all about these early years, with some sensitive and surprising works in two dimensions that also reveal a sense of humour too. The Femme Maison series play with imagery that flirts with the female form and particularly allusions to cages, enclosure and the notion of being trapped.
Walking around rooms 1 and 2 you'll perhaps see that Bourgeois is an artist concerned about illusion, about personal memories and psychological instances like anxiety and trauma. Here we begin to walk around three dimensional pieces such as Cell (Choisy) of 1990-93.
Cages are a recurring motif. Bourgeois suffers from agoraphobia, a fear of being in environments that are unfamiliar or where there's little perceived control: classically there's an anxiety about leaving the house. Cell (Choisy) recalls the house in Choisy-le-Roi, south of Paris, where the artist spent her very early years, from 1912 to 1917. It's a delicate pink marble carving of a dwelling, encased brutally in a rusty steel cage, trapping memories and recollections within.
Rooms 3 and 4 reveal the resourceful Bourgeois: on moving to New York in 1938 she was making small scale works that often take vertical forms, hewn from wood or metal. Often playful and referring to organic shapes and anthropomorphic forms, these peices (the Personage sculptures) cemented her reputation, as peace turned to war in what was then a male dominated north American art culture.
They're particularly satisfying sculptural statements. Though often made from found materials, little has been left unshaped or unpainted. There's a native American feel to these works too.
In rooms 5, 6 and 7 you'll walk around forms in marble and bronze that are increasingly phallic or sexually revealing. Some shapes are explicitly obvious, others mixing shapes and species in ways that make the exploration of these rooms a compelling three dimensional experience.
Arch of Hysteria, 1993, neatly sums up this later period of Bourgeois' canon that is both erotic and technically accomplished, like all her work. Here is a suspended, polished bronze form that arches in either pain, or ecstasy, or both. Walk around it and the shape is always surprising and pretty spectacular.
Leaving behind the shapes and forms of her apparently conventional sculptural moments, room 8 begins an exploration of the exterior/interior world that Bourgeois increasingly essayed in the 1980's after she aquired a bigger studio.
I found this place chilling. These are installations, cages, found objects, suspensions, dream interiors, glimpses of a neo-Freudian world that can be entered via small passageways let into the outside edges of the constructions.
Perhaps the most powerful work in this Tate show was, for me, Passage Dangereux, a recent work from 1997. Here is the world of the trapped, the impossible dream, a place where rows of chairs have floated off the floor and now orchestrate themselves in a dance around the architrave of the steel mesh room.
It's redolent of the asylum, a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or the place where you might be screened for psychotherapy. Not comfortable viewing, and Bourgeois doesn't make it easy for consumers of her work here.
To view this work you have to approach with caution and enter some passageways let into the sides at carefully placed points. Once there, you look around and see conjunctions of mirrors, objects and materials that sing a song of interior pain. www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
