Louise Bourgeois - Stitches in Time

Stitches in Time is the first major presentation in the UK of new work by Louise Bourgeois, one of the most influential artists of our time. The work includes a group of extraordinary life-size sewn fabric busts, several cell-like vitrines housing scenes of torture and ecstasy and totemic figures which reinterpret in fabric some of Bourgeois's very first sculptures from the 1940s and 50s. The sculptures are shown together with two major suites of etchings, the earliest of which is He Disappeared into Complete Silence, (1947), Bourgeois’s first significant group of etchings and poems in which tales of loss and loneliness unfold.

Tough and sometimes very moving, Bourgeois's recent work marks out an artist who, in her 92nd year, remains at the height of her powers.

An uncompromising and original artist, Louise Bourgeois has employed an astonishing array of modes of practice in her career of more than 60 years including carving, installation, castings in natural and man-made materials, text and illustration and needlecraft. Her diverse and experimental art has engaged with Surrealism, Cubism and Minimalism yet essentially Bourgeois has remained at one remove from the major 20th century art movements, her artistic innovation setting its own path. In 1982, the artist had her first retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Subsequent retrospectives followed at Robert Miller Gallery, New York (drawings) in 1988, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England (prints) in 1995, and Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, in 1998. Most recently Bourgeois’s dramatic installation I Do, I Undo, I Redo, three life-size towers featuring spiral staircases, dark enclosures and mirrored platforms in relationship to a small figure, was the inaugural installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, in 2000.

Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois trained as a painter in Paris and moved to New York in 1938 after her marriage to American art historian Robert Goldwater. In the ensuing decade, during which she raised three children, Bourgeois achieved immediate yet initially short-lived recognition, making sculptures, prints and performance art that explored the relationship between architecture and the human body – a recurring motif in her work that is situated within the artist’s own transgressive personal history.

She continued making art but it was not until the 1980s that she began to receive worldwide acclaim. Bourgeois elevates the importance of autobiography within contemporary art. To this day, her subjects and materials reflect the psychological impact of the manipulative relationship between her father, mother and childhood governess and where it was played out. Her family home in the Parisian suburbs, steeped in the tapestries of her seamstress mother and the wares of her antique dealer father, is frequently referenced within the architecture, furnishings and artefacts of her sculpture. According to the artist, her works are abstract expressions of emotional states, drawing on family memories, female sexuality and childhood trauma. At times disturbing and enigmatic, they are evocative signals to the darkness of the human spirit - accessible by the often domestic arrangement of stuffed figures or anatomical forms.

Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time is produced and organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Co-curated by Frances Morris, Senior Curator, Tate Modern and Brenda McParland, Senior Curator, Irish Museum of Modern Art. Pressetext 29 Jan 2004

Louise Bourgeois - Stitches in Time