Sydney Louise Bourgeois art exhibition

In the underground depths of the NSW Art Gallery’s Tank gallery, in pieces projected onto a wall, octogenarian artist Louise Bourgeois is peeling a tangerine. It is not a snack but a reflection of a formative and destructive childhood experience; she begins by sketching the outline of a female figure on the skin with a thick black marker, before carving the lines with a knife and erasing the results.

The tangerine routine was a party trick that Bourgeois’ father did when she was a child at Sunday dinners, often in front of guests; “I’m doing a little portrait of my daughter,” he announced. ​​​​The navel would be left to the end, as a revelation with a twist: not a girl after all but a boy, complete with a pithy penis. “Well, I’m sorry my daughter doesn’t display that beauty,” he exclaimed.

The young Bourgeois was left mortified; she couldn’t remember if the adults were laughing at her, but it felt like they were. “And the pain was very great.”

The documentary is part of the gallery’s gargantuan summer exhibition of the late French-American artist’s work, which spans two levels and nearly 130 works. As Bourgeois tells the story, her sculptor’s hands move confidently over the fruits, and she holds court as only a master storyteller can. I am transferred. Eventually, the artist is barely holding back tears; she has regressed to a little girl, wounded and humiliated by her father’s sexual cruelty.

The episode reflects the practice, personality and psychology of Bourgeois. And it exposes the fragile heart of the titan of art who was better known for his prickly public persona and creepy Lovecraftian spider sculptures. It’s great that this clip is buried in the bowels of the exhibition: we have to deal with beauty, illusion and analysis to deal with enlightenment. Further on the wall is a Bourgeois revenge fantasy tableau, Destruction of the Father: a red-lit cavity (orifice, belly, furnace or cave?) where bright, protuberant forms gather around a table (or is it. a bed?) spread with meat joints. Nearby, a spider the size of an army tank – a loving expression of its mother – watches over him.

Justin Paton, AGNSW’s chief international art curator, says it feels like “the tank was waiting for Louise, or Louise was waiting for the Tank”. It feels like a match made in heaven (or as the artist would probably say, hell), especially given Bourgeois’ fascination with cellars, wells, darkness and the abyss.

Opening on Saturday, this is the first solo exhibition to be hosted by AGNSW’s new gallery, which is called “Sydney Modern” but still has no name. Paton structured the show around the dichotomy of night and day, taking his cue from a line in Bourgeois’s gnomish typeface series What Is the Shape of This Problem?: “Has the day invaded the night or has the night given the day?” (This is also the gloriously unattractive title of the exhibition).

Upstairs, across a series of white-cube spaces, the viewer is taken on a tour through the artist’s life and work, from his pioneering sculpture series Personages in the 1940s, to two of his iconic installations of cage-like cells, and textile works made in the 1990s and 2000s as a tribute. with her mother’s work as a decorator and tapestry repairer.

There are many hands, spirals, breasts, blades and shuttles of thread. There are dreamy paintings of abstracted body parts in flesh pink and blood red watercolors; sex, motherhood and gore are everywhere.

Then, going down the spiral staircase to the Tank, there are many strong forms in front of you – nightmarish, playful, erotic, tender – without text or explanation: the strange results of the Bourgeois psyche.

Suspended in a central position within the room’s matrix of seven meter high concrete columns, a headless golden figure arches backwards as if submerged. It’s a moment of pause for some, but there are also many quieter touches: a lurking cat with five legs; spider mid scuttle up wall; and a small gouache work on paper from the funny, funny series The Feeding (mothers will feel it in their nipples).

Paton suggests moving from day to night but there is a strong case for the opposite: plub the dank, subliminal depth at first, before retreating to the bright field of personal history and psychological interpretation – something that inevitably undercut the mystery of Bourgeois artworks and compromise the chance of the audience. for a primal, instinctual reaction.

Bourgeois’ art was rooted in her childhood, particularly the deep emotional wounds left by her relationship with her parents. She felt abandoned by her mother, who died in 1932 when Louise was only 20; She felt betrayed by her father, a prolific philanderer.

Art, which she came to in her mid-20s after a degree in philosophy and an abandoned study of mathematics, was a means of processing this trauma and her changing relationship with it (she later succeeded in psychoanalysis, which affected her art). Reconciling with her mother (made famous by the behemoth spider sculpture Maman, now installed in the forecourt of the 19th century Art Gallery building), she dislikes her father.

Bourgeois also seemed to struggle with self-forgiveness. She described herself as a “runaway girl”: as a young woman, she abandoned her family in France, then on the verge of war, to move to New York with her new husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater.

They adopted one boy and quickly had two more, and the early Bourgeois artwork involved a very chaotic domestic space, where cooking and housekeeping took a back seat. (After the death of her husband in 1973, Bourgeois ripped out the stove, cut the dining table in half to make a desk, and turned the whole house into a studio, writing on its walls). She did not identify as a feminist, but there were many artists who admired her, a group of whom petitioned New York’s MoMA in 1973 to give Bourgeois her first solo show – a milestone that led to the end of her a frustrating career, in 1982.

These days, it feels like Bourgeois is everywhere. In Australia this year alone her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, and in upcoming group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian Center for Contemporary Art. And little wonder: raw, intense and courageous, her art tackles anything less than the human condition.

Bourgeois, who died in 2010, has taken her rightful place as a giant among artists of any era.

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