Louise Bourgeois

About

Bourgeois' new works express both fragility and anxiety, and ultimately optimism. As is typical of her art, they seek a reconciliation of opposites, of hard with soft, geometric with organic, enigma with familiarity, and trauma with restoration: 'I am trying to seek a balance between the extremes that I feel. I want to be reasonable.' A series of standing sculptures (all 2007) continue the processing of the contents of her wardrobe as raw materials, a practice begun by the artist in the mid-nineties. In these new works, Bourgeois has re-stitched, draped and stuffed her clothes to create abstract forms, which she has then cast in bronze and painted. The resulting works are reminiscent of her early personages of the 1940s and 1950s. Bourgeois sees the folds, knots and orifices of these bronzes as suggestive of maternal nurturing and warmth, yet the sculptures' whiteness and extremes of shape are also unsettling.

Gouache paintings continue Bourgeois' preoccupation with the relationships of family, with coupling, pregnancy and child rearing. In works such as The Good Mother, The Pregnant Mother and The Hysterical Mother (all 2007) red figures are depicted with pendulous breasts, swollen stomachs and split heads. Their emphatically sexual characteristics are reminiscent of sculptures Bourgeois made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which reduced the body of a limbless woman to her belly, breasts and neck.

Hauser & Wirth is also exhibiting Nothing to Remember (2004 ' 2006), two 22 page portfolios of coloured images and text on top of hand-drawn music manuscript paper. It follows from an earlier book, Ode à  l 'Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), which Bourgeois made entirely out of fabric, using the linens and clothing remnants from her past. The words and images in Nothing to Remember are tentative and delicate, conveying the significance and fleetingness of memories.