Louise Bourgeois. I Have Been to Hell and Back

This summer, Museo Picasso Málaga will be showing the complex and fascinating work of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), one of the most influential artists of the 20th to 21st century.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, into a well-to-do family that ran a workshop restoring medieval and Renaissance tapestries. In 1938 she moved to the United States, where she lived for the rest of her life. A member of the American Abstract Artists Group, she achieved critical recognition and commercial success at the age of 71, after the retrospective organized by MoMA in 1982. Her original and complex oeuvre is both diverse and fascinating, and it examines memory, sexuality, motherhood and frustration. Bourgeois worked with every genre - sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art – to create her unique and lyrical autobiographical work.

Bourgeois devised sculptures of all sizes, produced suggestive drawings and engravings, built unsettling installations, made figures out of a variety of woven fabrics, and created the giant metal spiders that were to make her world-famous. Working in bronze, wood, steel and marble, or innovating with fabric and cork, she depicted organic forms that were often sexually explicit and emotionally aggressive, and which spoke of human vulnerability and need for protection, in the threatening and perturbing world around us.

Louise Bourgeois’ career coincided with that of Pablo Picasso in a number of ways: both were born into middle-class families and produced most of their artistic work in another country. Innovation and experimentation were constant features of their lengthy artistic careers, and their respective oeuvres have served as referents for subsequent generations of artists. Following on from the exhibition Sophie Tauber-Arp. Avant-garde Pathways (October, 2009 - January, 2010) and Hilma-af-Klint. A Pioneer of Abstraction (October, 2013 - February, 2014), Museo Picasso Málaga is once again presenting a retrospective that highlights artworks produced by the women in art history.

Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann and organized with the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, this retrospective brings together over 100 artworks produced over seven decades, one third of which have never been shown before.