The art of Louise Bourgeois
is most closely associated with provocative imagery, in the form of figures,
body parts, spiders, and architectural structures. Yet abstraction plays a
highly significant role overall. Printed grids, biomorphic ink drawings, and
geometric wood totems are found in her early years, organically shaped marble
and plaster sculptures come later, and an outpouring of abstract drawings and
prints fills her last decade.
For Bourgeois, abstraction
was yet another tool for understanding and coping with her feelings, which were
always the driving forces of her art. She used terms like “calming,”
“caressing,” or “stabbing” to describe strokes, and her drawn lines and
evocative shapes reflect shifting moods and perceived vulnerabilities. Her methods
harked back to the automatism of the Surrealists, in which compositions evolved
intuitively with symbolic overtones. She often took advantage of repetition,
drawing simple straight lines across sheets of notepads as she struggled with
insomnia, thereby creating a diary of her fraught emotions.
Within the formats of
printmaking—books, portfolios, and series—Bourgeois assembled abstract
narratives, sometimes adding fragments of text. In fabric, her pages were
fashioned from materials with stripes, plaids, or curvilinear patterns. The
backdrop of music staves printed on paper provided another abstract foil for
her rhythmic lines and shapes. In her last years, Bourgeois took up the
technique of soft ground etching, which allowed her wavering touch to be sensitively
captured. The result was a series of monumental abstract prints, often with
hand-coloring, that are sometimes shown in room-scale installations.
“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an
emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of
destroying.”
https://www.moma.org/explore/collection/lb/themes/abstraction
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