Louise Bourgeois in "Identity"
Louise Bourgeois
Active since the early 1940s, Louise Bourgeois has consistently plumbed her own biography for subject matter and inspiration. Working with delicate stone sculptures in public spaces and plaster casts of hands, Bourgeois explores memory, emotion, and strength through works that reach viewers on a visceral level.
“A work of art doesn’t have to be explained,” she says. “If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.” Bourgeois’ work challenges viewers to make connections between their own lives and the lives staged in the artist’s installations, drawings, and public sculptures.
Featured artists
About the artists
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She first studied mathematics at Sorbonne University before pursuing a degree in arts at various schools around Paris, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she immigrated to the United States, continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York, and began making sculptures on the roof of her apartment. Bourgeois’s early sculptures were composed of groupings of abstract shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s, the artist began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant themes of her work: her childhood, familial trauma, and loneliness.
Keep watching
13:58Delcy Morelos in “Human Nature”
Delcy Morelos
54:05Human Nature
Delcy Morelos · Lenka Clayton · Josh Kline · Sin Wai Kin
14:08Josh Kline in “Human Nature”
Josh Kline