Untitled (House #2)

Realized in magnificent marble, Louise Bourgeois’s Untitled (House #2), from 1994, is a moving consideration of the meaning of house and home, returning to one of the artist’s defining motifs. Sitting with a stately solidity, Bourgeois’s marble block is carved into two units, whose structures interlock; the two halves of the work can be separated from or reattached to the other. The house remained a central image for Bourgeois throughout her career, beginning with her Femmes-Maisons paintings of the 1940s, in which women’s heads were replaced with images of houses, interrogating the way in which society forced domesticity onto women and supplanted their own sense of identity. And indeed, in this fractured interpretation of the image of the house, related to the artist’s own difficult childhood, there is a dialogue established with another earlier series: the Maisons fragiles. This related body of work implements tall, willowy structures, inverting the idea of the house as a haven, in eerie imagery of emptiness and instability. Yet by contrast, here the home is turned into a cracked monument: the beauty and grandeur of the marble iconifies the idea of home, but it is at the same time damaged, its single, unified identity split in two. There is an ambiguous optimism to be derived from the work at the same time. While the marble is in one sense divided, Bourgeois’s careful carving might equally be seen as an expression of concord, with the two blocks slotting into each other’s grooves like a jigsaw puzzle–thus, both an expression of unity and division.