WORCESTER ART MUSEUM'S NEW ACQUISITION BY LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Friday, 27 October 2006 08:00

WORCESTER, Mass. - Worcester Art Museum is pleased to present Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child (in context), on view until February 25, 2007.  At 95, Louise Bourgeois, who has been making art since the 1940s, continues to be one of the most innovative and influential artists of our time (she has been referred to as “the oldest of young artists”). Her career has spanned Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, feminist art and installation art, but her work always has remained distinct from any singular style or movement.

Over the years, Bourgeois experimented with a range of materials (including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex). In the late 1990s, she embarked on what has become an extraordinary body of sculptural and two-dimensional works in fabric.  This late-in-life chapter of her career is especially significant because it brings Bourgeois back to her “original aesthetic impulse”—working with textiles.  At the age of 12 she began to work at her mother’s side in the family business of restoring Medieval and Renaissance tapestries in Antony, France.  She assumed the role of ‘dessinateur,’ redrawing the sections of the missing parts of the antique tapestries, which would then be rewoven.

The Worcester exhibition focuses on a group of Bourgeois’ fabric figures and books (from 1996-2004), and includes the U.S. premiere of a major fabric sculpture, The Woven Child (2002), recently acquired by the Museum. The project introduces what is new in this artist’s prolific career while it also demonstrates the continued relevance of textiles to Bourgeois.  Cloth remnants recycled into figures, columns, and books, have become an ideal medium for recovering and exorcising aspects of her childhood and family life.

“The bond between a mother and a child is important.  It is from here that our relationship to others and the world begins.” -Louise Bourgeois.

Although rooted in her lived (and gendered) experiences as daughter, wife, and mother, the content of Bourgeois’ art is primarily archetypal and explores the psychological and emotional effects of human relations, the intimacies as well as the anxieties.  In The Woven Child, Bourgeois reinterprets a subject found throughout the history of art—the mother and child.  However, she consciously chose to construct the figures out of fabric (including remnants from garments, linens, and towels she owned), a fragile material not typically used for sculpture but laden with human associations such as warmth, intimacy, and vulnerability.

In another departure from tradition, Bourgeois created a mother who is headless and limbless, a patchwork torso of crudely stitched scraps that neither embraces nor gazes upon the perfect little infant curled upon her belly.  A glass and steel vitrine both protects and imprisons this vulnerable pair.

Bourgeois has said that she is “interested in the portraiture of a relationship…the effect people have on one another.”  In The Woven Child, she engages a dialectics of self and other, estrangement and intimacy, awkwardness and tenderness, inadequacy and promise.  Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, and moved to New York City in 1938 where she has since lived and worked.  She is the first woman to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1982), and will be the subject of an internationally touring retrospective in 2007 being organized by Tate Modern in London.  She is represented in New York by Cheim & Read.

The Worcester Art Museum, which opened to the public in 1898, is world-renowned for its 40,000-piece collection of paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photography, prints, drawings and new media.  The works span 5,000 years of art and culture, ranging from ancient Roman mosaics to Colonial silver, Impressionist paintings and contemporary art.  Dedicated to the promotion of art and art education, the Museum offers a year-round studio art and art appreciation program that enrolls over 6,000 adult and youth students each year.  The Museum is located at 55 Salisbury St., Worcester, Mass.  Visit the Museum web site at www.worcesterart.org