Louise Bourgeois: The Reticent Child

The exhibition takes its title from the sculpture "The Reticent Child" that Louise Bourgeois created for the Freud Museum in Vienna in 2003 and is being shown in New York for the first time. As a direct response to "The Reticent Child", Bourgeois completed a suite of 82 drawings entitled "Il était réticent. Mais je l'ai révélé." (He was reticent. But I have revealed him.) In these abstract drawings the mystery and silence of "The Reticent Child" is transformed into woven gestural grids of revelation.

Bourgeois will also exhibit an autobiographical series of cut and sewn fabric drawings inspired by the memories of the river that flowed throughout he garden in the house where she had grown up in Antony, France. As Bourgeois has stated, "my childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama."

Louise Bourgeois
The Reticent Child