‘If I am in a positive mood, I’m interested in joining. If I’m in a negative mood, I will cut things. My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don’t do that. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same…I go from one extreme to the other.’
Louise Bourgeois
In 1998, Serpentine presented recent work by Louise Bourgeois. This was the artist’s second solo exhibition at Serpentine, following Nature Study in 1985, her first and seminal exhibition in a public institution in the UK.
Still prolific at the age of eighty-seven, the exhibition demonstrated the remarkable and creative inventiveness of an artist whose artistic activity had spanned five decades.
The exhibition was organised around the resurgent theme of spinning, sewing and weaving, a theme intimately connected to Bourgeois’ childhood, growing up in a family of antique tapestry restorers. Her interest in these themes emerged with The Needle series in which long, curved, steel shafts were draped with items such as skeins of flax, or in the case of Spindle (1992), a light garment balanced by heavy weights. Later works such as, In Respite (1993), also referenced this theme, with bobbins tightly wound with dense black thread juxtaposed with an elongated, and vulnerable pink rubber pendulum pierced with needles. The needle functions as a vehicle for healing and the stitch for suture. As Bourgeois has stated, ‘All the women in my house used needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’
The image of the spider as a patient and protective weaver was a key symbol unifying the body of work in the exhibition and Bourgeois specifically associated this image with her mother. In Spider, 1997, a monumental bronze spider looms over a cage-like cell with fragments of tapestries suspended from the wire walls, referring to the ancient tapestries that would have been sent to her mother’s restoration shop for repair.
The exhibition also included Cells and Poles in which the artist used as a material her own clothes dating back to her childhood. Delicate ivory underslips, a blush-pink frocks, a revealing black, sequined cocktail dress, are suspended on metal hooks or hung on bones like ghostly spirits. In its entirety, the exhibition picked up the thread of the artist’s memories and explored her engagement with eroticism now subtly combined with the subject of death.
Louise Bourgeois: Recent Work was re-selected from an exhibition organised by the CAPC Museé d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, the Centro cultural de Belém and the Malmö Konsthall.
From the archive
Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study
