TOKYO.- The Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo, is presenting Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful through January 19, 2025.
Louise Bourgeois (born 1911 in Paris; died 2010 in New York) is one of the most important artists of the last century. During a career that spanned 70 years, and in a wide variety of media – including installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting – she explored the tensions within binary oppositions through unrivaled formal invention. Polarities such as male and female, passive and active, figuration and abstraction, conscious and unconscious, and others, often coexist within the same work.
Delve into the intricate world of Louise Bourgeois through her beautifully illustrated books.
Bourgeois’s art was inspired in part by the complex and at times traumatic events of her early childhood. The act of restaging her memories and emotions allowed her to sublimate them into universal motifs and to express contradictory emotional and psychological states: hope and fear, anxiety and calm, guilt and reparation, tension and release. Performances and sculptures that foreground sexuality, gender, and the lived body were highly acclaimed particularly within a feminist context.
Bourgeois’s art has had a profound influence on many artists and continues to be exhibited at major museums around the world. This exhibition, Bourgeois’s first in Japan in 27 years and her largest solo exhibition in the country to date, showcases more than 100 works across three chapters that offer a comprehensive overview of her practice.
The subtitle of the exhibition, I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. is taken from a late fabric work in which Bourgeois embroidered these words on a handkerchief. It alludes to the fluctuations and ambivalent character of her emotions, and hints at her black sense of humor. Bourgeois saw herself as a survivor. Her work expresses her strong will to live and the promise of overcoming the sometimes “hellish” suffering of mankind, which is all too often exacerbated by war, natural disaster, and disease.
Born 1911 in Paris, Louise Bourgeois was the second daughter of parents who ran a tapestry restoration atelier and sales gallery. The effects of a complex family dynamic left a lasting impact on young Bourgeois’s heart: her father’s domineering behavior and the caregiving she provided her chronically ill mother led to pervasive feelings of guilt, betrayal, and abandonment. In 1932, when she was twenty, her mother died. Bourgeois subsequently enrolled in mathematics classes at the Sorbonne University, but her ongoing grief soon turned her to art. She began taking art classes at the Sorbonne, but also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She frequented several artists’ academies and studios in Paris, including that of Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she began exhibiting her work in the mid-1940s. She became an American citizen in 1957 and was the first female sculptor to have a major solo exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. In 1989, she held her first solo exhibition in Europe at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Germany); and in 1993, Bourgeois represented the United States at Venice Biennale. In the 1990s and 2000s, she had numerous important solo exhibitions, including at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1995), Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan, 1997), and Tate Modern (London, 2000).
Bourgeois’s reputation has only grown since her death in 2010. Major exhibitions have been organized at Foundation Beyeler (Basel, Switzerland, 2011), Freud Museum London (2012), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2015), Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany, 2015), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2017), Long Museum (Shanghai, China, 2018), Hayward Gallery (London, 2022), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2022), Belvedere Museum (Vienna, 2023-2024), and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, 2023-2024).
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