.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A compelling, enigmatic sculptural presence, Untitled (2002) exemplifies the material and psychological power that defines Louise Bourgeois’s practice. Inside a wood-floored vitrine elevated on metal legs, a small pink head—hand-sewn from woollen textile—arises from a square cushion. The cushion is slightly paler in colour, with whip-stitched seams; bed-like, it seems to stage the head as an emerging presence in a dream, or a birth. It is a surreal, ambiguous image, foregrounding Bourgeois’s fascination with the workings of the unconscious. Created when she was ninety years old, the work sees her practice come full circle: her use of needlework revisits a foundational aesthetic impulse that began in her family’s antique tapestry repair workshop in Aubusson, France, in the 1920s. Having worked in lithography, carving, casting, assemblage, installation and performance art over the course of her eight-decade career, Bourgeois’s return to fabric creates a form that bares its sutures openly, with a sense of the mind and body cut up, examined and reassembled. The result is a succinct expression of the essence of her work: the unfixed nature of self and memory, and the sexual, emotional and intellectual threads that knit us together.
Bourgeois’s autobiography plays a vital role in her art, which has been described as a form of psychoanalysis. She laid out her childhood in a 1982 text titled ‘Child Abuse’, which detailed a deep-seated trauma stemming from her father’s affair with her English governess, as well as the illness and untimely death of her mother in 1932. This story became the prism through which Bourgeois’s work was viewed, and was cultivated by the artist as something of a creation myth. From her early paintings to her vast sculptures and installations, it could be taken as the key to the psychosexual dramas staged in her work. In reference to the family business, she frequently employed metaphors of weaving and repair, with some of her most iconic sculptures figuring her mother as a vast, benevolent spider. In this light, hand-stitched works like Untitled might be seen as attempts to reconstruct the fabric of the past, and to weave a self-image from the narrative strands of an emotional interior. Bourgeois viewed pink textile as distinctly feminine. The present work’s echoes of childbirth invoke a key correspondence in her work between images of birth (or pregnancy) and art-making: a parallel that often recurred as she explored the creative, nurturing and sometimes ambivalent roles of mother and artist.
The figure’s placement in a glass container harks back to Bourgeois’s Cells, an important series of works that she executed in the late 1980s. These room-sized assemblages of objects and sculpture invited the viewer into intimate psychological spaces, and were unnervingly ambiguous: were they homes, prisons, or places of shelter? Similarly, the present work’s vitrine makes the viewer a voyeur. We gaze upon a contained body, recalling the cage-like motif found in Francis Bacon’s paintings, as well as the existential space-frames that surround the sculptures of Giacometti. In Bacon’s work in particular, this device creates a sense of claustrophobic angst. There is a fine line between protection and entrapment. In this case, however, the soft object is imbued with a sense of totemic, reliquary power. In sealing it behind glass, perhaps, Bourgeois is content to let go of a precious part of her self, imperfect but complete, and present it to the world. ‘The skeins of wool are a friendly refuge, like a web or a cocoon’, she said in 1988. ‘The caterpillar gets the silk from his mouth, builds his cocoon and when it is completed he dies. The cocoon has exhausted the animal. I am the cocoon. I have no ego. I am my work’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Statements 1988’, in H-U. Obrist and M-L. Bernadac (eds.), Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, Cambridge, MA 2005, p. 173).
Bourgeois’s autobiography plays a vital role in her art, which has been described as a form of psychoanalysis. She laid out her childhood in a 1982 text titled ‘Child Abuse’, which detailed a deep-seated trauma stemming from her father’s affair with her English governess, as well as the illness and untimely death of her mother in 1932. This story became the prism through which Bourgeois’s work was viewed, and was cultivated by the artist as something of a creation myth. From her early paintings to her vast sculptures and installations, it could be taken as the key to the psychosexual dramas staged in her work. In reference to the family business, she frequently employed metaphors of weaving and repair, with some of her most iconic sculptures figuring her mother as a vast, benevolent spider. In this light, hand-stitched works like Untitled might be seen as attempts to reconstruct the fabric of the past, and to weave a self-image from the narrative strands of an emotional interior. Bourgeois viewed pink textile as distinctly feminine. The present work’s echoes of childbirth invoke a key correspondence in her work between images of birth (or pregnancy) and art-making: a parallel that often recurred as she explored the creative, nurturing and sometimes ambivalent roles of mother and artist.
The figure’s placement in a glass container harks back to Bourgeois’s Cells, an important series of works that she executed in the late 1980s. These room-sized assemblages of objects and sculpture invited the viewer into intimate psychological spaces, and were unnervingly ambiguous: were they homes, prisons, or places of shelter? Similarly, the present work’s vitrine makes the viewer a voyeur. We gaze upon a contained body, recalling the cage-like motif found in Francis Bacon’s paintings, as well as the existential space-frames that surround the sculptures of Giacometti. In Bacon’s work in particular, this device creates a sense of claustrophobic angst. There is a fine line between protection and entrapment. In this case, however, the soft object is imbued with a sense of totemic, reliquary power. In sealing it behind glass, perhaps, Bourgeois is content to let go of a precious part of her self, imperfect but complete, and present it to the world. ‘The skeins of wool are a friendly refuge, like a web or a cocoon’, she said in 1988. ‘The caterpillar gets the silk from his mouth, builds his cocoon and when it is completed he dies. The cocoon has exhausted the animal. I am the cocoon. I have no ego. I am my work’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Statements 1988’, in H-U. Obrist and M-L. Bernadac (eds.), Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, Cambridge, MA 2005, p. 173).