About
Louise Bourgeois is one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time. In a career spanning seven decades, from the 1940s until her death in 2010, she produced some of contemporary art's most enduring images, making sculptures, installations, writings and drawings which, in mining her own psyche, have entered the collective unconscious.
Bourgeois's work is personal yet universal, rooted in the details of her own life, but reaching out to touch the lives of others. This exhibition of work on paper presents some of her most intimate work, both drawing and writing.
The exhibition begins with a labyrinthine presentation of Bourgeois's Insomnia Drawings, a remarkable suite of 220 drawings and writings made between 1994 and June 1995 specifically to combat the insomnia which she once described as regulating her life. Created in the suspended state between sleeping and waking, The Insomnia Drawings contain all the major themes of Bourgeois's work and reveal the close link between drawing and writing that is such a key part of her practice.
Also in the exhibition are two beautiful suites of large-scale works on paper, When Did This Happen? from 2007, and I Give Everything Away, made right at the end of the artist's life in 2010. A mix of writing, drawing and printmaking, these large works are both haunted and haunting.
The exhibition is curated by Frances Morris, who curated The Fruitmarket Gallery's 2004 exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois, Stitches in Time, and went on to curate the major retrospective of Bourgeois's work at Tate Modern in 2007. Almost exactly ten years after first showing the work of this extraordinary artist to audiences in Edinburgh The Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to present this new exhibition which, in focusing on drawing and writing, cuts to the heart of Louise Bourgeois's work, providing both a key to and a celebration of her unique creative energy.
This exhibition complements a major ARTIST ROOMS exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Louise Bourgeois: âA Woman Without Secrets', Modern One, 26 October 2013 18 May 2014.
