25/12/1911- 31/05/2010
Img:Louise Bourgeois
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2004/9/e/1/293.php
“I appreciate very much the mechanisms of seduction. I tell myself : “Louise, how will you do to seduce this stone and change it into an art work?” I am talking in terms of seduction because the resistance of the marble is almost total. Resistance attracts me”. “For me the sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture”. (Louise Bourgeois)
http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/bourgeois/exhibition.html
Cells
Having long worked in improvised spaces within her domestic environment, Bourgeois’s move in 1980 to an expansive studio in an abandoned garment factory in Brooklyn allowed her to consistently pursue work on a more ambitious scale. Over the subsequent decades, she devoted much of her energy to creating a series of haunting, roomlike spaces in a manifestation of the architectural imagery that pervaded her earliest work. The structures deny entry to their cloistered interiors, but the viewer is prompted to peer inside and encounter a voyeuristic perspective on a private world. Bourgeois refers to these installations as Cells, a term that invites associations with incarceration and monastic contemplation, as well as with the most basic element of the human body. Combining sculptural works with found objects she has amassed throughout her life, these complex assemblages are vessels for potent psychological narratives, revealing with unprecedented emotional intensity the artist’s attempt to confront and transmute her own history. Nowhere is the tragic fragility of childhood innocence more viscerally present than in Cell (Choisy) (1990–93), in which a guillotine hangs ominously over a scale replica of the house in which Bourgeois grew up. But these works transcend their autobiographical underpinnings to become materializations of the trials of the human condition. “The Cells represent different types of pain,” Bourgeois has explained, “the physical, the emotional, and psychological, and the mental and intellectual.”