Louise Bourgeois & Van Gelder: Louise Bourgeois Portrait Photography by Alex Van Gelder

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Um Museum is pleased to present an exhibition entitled Louise Bourgeois & Van Gelder: Louise Bourgeois Portrait Photography by Alex Van Gelder from 1 October to 31 December in 2019.

Dutch photographer Alex Van Gelder captured late life and work of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in her final two years of her long life spanning nearly a century. The portrait of Bourgeois features the artist as a down-to-earth personage and offers a glimpse of her late creativity continued until the last years of her life.

This particular portrait photography was realized through collaboration with the elderly artist who was his longtime friend, and was taken at her home and studio in New York. The portrait is now remained as an evocative marker that reminisces about the last traces of the artist’s new endeavor and experiments with employing acting and photography, and her ceaseless curiosity on  the late style of creativity.

The portrait photographic practice and the resulting images, some of which could be considered an extension of her late work, open up varying ideas of artistic autonomy and independence upending a conventional way of looking at how the acclaimed personage is supposed to be presented in existing social and cultural myths. Their collaborative work emanates unique energy of unpretentious and raw beauty.

Louise Bourgeois & Van Gelder: Louise Bourgeois Portrait Photography by Alex Van Gelder presents thirty-three works of Bougeois’s last portrait photographs selected among the eighty-one pieces featured in a book entitled Mumbling Beauty Louise Bourgeois by Alex Van Gelder published in 2015. Since its first introduction to the world, it returns to us four years later as a formal exhibition for the first time around the world. The exhibition will offer a rare insight of liberal and creative spirit and diversity of authorship in contemporary portrait photography by looking back at one of the greatest artists of all time.