Louise Bourgeois: Persistent Antagonism

The catalogue accompanies a major solo exhibition to Louise Bourgeois. Her paintings from the 1940s will be placed in dialogue with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from all periods of her storied career. By the 1990s, she had won global renown for her artistic achievements, becoming famous for her monumental spider sculptures and room-sized Cells. But it was in her oil paintings made between 1938 and 1949 that the French-American artist first developed the formal vocabulary and defined the thematic concerns that she would continue to explore over the following six decades. In an oeuvre which covered a wide range of formal and material experimentation, Bourgeois succeeded in expressing contradictory impulses and binary oppositions - figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious - within a single work. Text: Louise Bourgeois, Bice Curiger, Sabine Fellner, Johanna Hofer, Ulf Küster, Stella Rollig, John Yau.