Bourgeois, the Great
LONDON- Her exceptional longevity brings her close to creators such as Manoel de Oliveira or Mario Monicelli, comfortably in their nineties. Over 95 years old, the «grande dame indigne» of contemporary art is still around. The exhibition at the Tate Modern has the ambition of presenting all of her very varied work, influenced by the Surrealists as well as by Léger (who was her teacher), by conceptual art as well as by feminist, committed art. Though born in France in 1911, Louise Bourgeois developed most of her career in the USA, where she settled right before World War II. She is the object of a true cult, especially after the retrospective in 1982 at the MoMA, one of the first dedicated to a woman artist. From her monumental metal sculptures (such as the giant spider that inaugurated the same Tate Modern in 2000) to her drawings, from the installations to the sexual compositions in latex or in dolls, Louise Bourgeois’ repertoir defies all classification. This presentation, meant to travel throughout the world and in particular the USA (Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim New York, Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum) aims in a way at being the definite retrospective, with 200 works of which the most recent are in material.
Louise Bourgeois at the Tate Modern, from 11 October 2007 to 20 January 2008