Louise Bourgeois has lived a long life – 98 years – and she has managed to connect different eras of art. She is one of the most important artistic phenomena of the 20th century, which has never allowed itself to be limited. Frenchwoman Louise Bourgeois lived in the USA since 1938. She has expressed herself in painting, graphics, sculpture, installation and textile art, always maintaining her handwriting and strongly autobiographical approach to her work.
At the exhibition in Oslo, Louise Bourgeois’ interlocutors become both her predecessors and contemporaries, whom she has met and those she has not met, as well as artists who are currently working and who have been influenced and inspired by her. Along with Louise Bourgeois, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurence, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Bonnard, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Archile Gorky, Dora Mara, Louise Nevelson, Joseph Beuys, Man Ray, Senga Nengudi, Alina Shaposhnikova, Seini Ava Kamara, Francis Bacon, Nena Goldin, Robert Gober, David Vojnarowicz, Rozmaria Trokel, Eva Hesse, Roni Horna, Yajoi Kusama, Filida Barlov, as well as the Estonian artist Anu Peder.
Imaginary conversations highlights Louise Bourgeois’s dialogue with the times in which she lived. The exhibition introduces the artist, who during her career focused on artistic and social changes, such as body representation in the 1960s, feminism in the 1970s, and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. years. The exhibition highlights Louise Bourgeois’ signature art themes of loneliness, love, illness, sexuality, family relationships and gender roles. The exhibition emphasizes the author’s connection with art history, in which she is a central axis connecting modern, postmodern and contemporary art.
The museum in Oslo exhibits works covering a wide range of Louise Bourgeois’s oeuvre, starting with paintings and graphics created in the 1940s and ending with installations and objects created in the last decades of her life. The exhibition is intense and active, the works exhibited in it create a strong field of energy around them. There is something unimaginably powerful, primal powerful and spontaneous in the psychologically diverse, often disturbing art of Louise Bourgeois. It has aggression, pain, cruelty, tenderness, irony, seriousness, clarity and directness. Her sculptures and installations, which also feature performative elements, are physically effective, they structure the space around them and conjure up an emotionally charged atmosphere.
It should be reminded that the artist became a superstar at the age of 71 – after the 1982 retrospective at New York’s MoMA Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois is the first woman to be honored with a retrospective at this institution. With her work, the artist confidently created a new way to articulate the presence of women in a patriarchal world. No wonder she has become a feminist icon.
In the late 1980s, at her home in New York, Louise Bourgeois started holding a weekly salon on Sundays, where she invited young artists, writers, curators and friends to talk and exchange ideas. The exhibition features a version of the salon, where you can get acquainted with unique video recordings made during these meetings. On the other hand, Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculpture has taken up residence in the park of the Royal Palace in the center of Oslo for the duration of the exhibition. Maman (1999). Like her other works, this one is also autobiographical – the giant spider symbolizes the artist’s mother.
Information: nasjonalmuseet.no
2023-07-12 23:18:51
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