This book provides a comprehensive overview of French-American Louise Bourgeois' fabric works from the last two decades of the world-renowned artist's career. The fabric works emerged when Bourgeois (1911-2010) began to incorporate scraps of clothing into her art and later expanded with other textiles, such as bed linen, handkerchiefs and tapestries and needlepoint. Louise Bourgeois is in Louisiana's collection and has exhibited at the museum several times - among other things the characteristic, psychologically powerful, spider sculptures.
In the context of her works in clothing and fabric, Bourgeois has said: "I've always had a fascination with the sewing needle, the magical power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a demand for forgiveness."
For Bourgeois, the fabric works with the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and compensation, and functions as metaphors for emotional and psychological states.
Louise Bourgeois' work is full of autobiography, father disputes, painful experiences from life as a child and as a woman. It revolves around confinement, surveillance and nightmares. Experiences that just won't let go and which are apparently close to the traumatic, like a psychotherapeutic bond alley.
Dimensions: H: 28 x W: 24 cm, stapled
Pages: 192
Language: English
Author: Ralph Rugoff
Publisher: Hatje Cantz