Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois in studio in 1960 posing with Life Flower IBourgeois, known primarily known now as a sculptor, spent years in New York City around the second world war creating paintings. These paintings are evocative and dense with symbolism. Heavy work from a woman grappling with complicated situations and her feelings about them.
In this nightmarish scene (Red Night, below), Bourgeois huddles in bed with her three sons, immersed in a field of red; For Bourgeois, the colour of blood, pain, and violence. Diaries of the 1940’s convey her struggles with motherhood. This painting serves as a recording of a recurring dream in which she and her children were in danger.
Understood as a self-portrait, to serve, identify and locate herself and also referring to the sense of displacement she felt after her move to New York on the eve of World War II.
Red Night 1945Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
—Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois: Paintings
These paintings, shown at The Met in 2022 are a rarely seen body of work that reflects the artist’s intimate knowledge of the European avant-garde she carried with her to New York.
Evident here is her interest in French and Italian Renaissance for their conventions representing three-dimensional space, which she had privy to through The Met collection.
Bourgeois also had a special interest in modernist architecture and Surrealism that is practiced in her dream-like imagery and minimal aesthetic choices.
In paintings, Bourgeois established architectural space as a core concern moving forward and developed a visual vocabulary of motifs that would reappear consistently throughout her decades-long career. Though she is best known today as a sculptor, Bourgeois’ practice focus of inventions came about first in the form of painting.
You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.
—Louise Bourgeois
Confrerie — 1940More from the Blog:
