@ Aspen Art Museum Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work – by NY Arts

Louise Bourgeois is now recognized internationally as one of the most important twentieth-century American artists, yet she spent over half of her career in relative obscurity.

@ Aspen Art Museum Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work

by NY Arts

Louise Bourgeois is now recognized internationally as one of the most important twentieth-century American artists, yet she spent over half of her career in relative obscurity. Shortly after moving from France to New York City in the 1940s, Bourgeois produced her first mature, highly original works in the United States. Her art was included in several group exhibitions with such Abstract Expressionists as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, and she was associated with many avant-garde artists in New York, including exiled European Surrealists and Dadaists. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois is still actively involved in the international art scene.

While the work of Louise Bourgeois has been celebrated throughout the world in the last 20 years, this will be the most comprehensive museum exhibition on Bourgeois’s early work organized in this country. This exhibition will present a selection of works Bourgeois produced during the 1940s and 1950s, including 25 early sculptures (referred to as Personages), 17 paintings, 30 early drawings, and a set of prints. Most of the works have never been shown publicly.

While most of her contemporaries were drawn toward pure abstraction, the work of Louise Bourgeois is psychological and symbolic. Themes already evident in these early works continued to resonate throughout her career. The Personages represent Bourgeois’s first explorations in sculpture. They suggest moments of alienation as well as evocative encounters. The psychologically charged paintings included in this exhibition are examples of Bourgeois’s brief exploration with that medium. Several of these paintings merge a woman∂s identity with domestic space, implying a frightening outcome. The subject matter for the drawings varies from landscapes of Bourgeois’s childhood and anthropomorphic houses to alienating machines and high-rise buildings. The series of prints, He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), inspired by New York’s landscape of skyscrapers, reflects her experiences of moving from Europe to metropolitan America, presenting her own hermetic texts juxtaposed with enigmatic pictures.

Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work

December 13, 2002 – February 2, 2003

Lower Gallery

Exhibition Reception: Thursday, December 12, 2002, 6-8pm

Related public lectures:

Robert Storr Friday, January 3rd at 5pm

This exhibition is organized by the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A fully illustrated catalogue, approximately 150 pages in length, accompanies the exhibition.