LOUISE BOURGEOIS

(1911-2010)

Untitled
1997

Footnotes

Provenance
Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz
Acquired directly above by the present owner in 2002

Exhibited
Halmstad, Sweden, Mjellby Konstmuseum, Fernand Léger, 2005 (the bronze edition exhibited)
San Francisco, Gallery Paule Anglim, Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Drawings, 2005, (the bronze edition exhibited)
Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien, Le Surrealisme, C'est Moi! Homage to Salvador Dali, 2011, p. 84, (the bronze edition exhibited)

Few artists of the twentieth century have credited the source of their art more to their own personal life and history than Louise Bourgeois. Yet her art remains intriguing, her private thoughts shrouded in mystery, her emotions eluding a final, definite reading. From her personal roots and experiences, Bourgeois takes the viewer down a road steeped in ancient myth and complex psychological dynamics leading to universal truths and introspection. Her world of inner turmoil is made universal and physical through her groundbreaking artistic practice that rightfully earned her a place as of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Originally conceived in 1997 and later cast in bronze in an edition of 8 with 2 artist proofs, Untitled from 1997 is one of two plaster studies for the later edition and an enduring example of Louise Bourgeois' refined and emotionally charged sculptural practice. The other plaster study created is in the collection of the Louise Bourgeois Estate. The present work is entirely fresh to the market, having remained in the same private collection for two decades.

Bourgeois' work is informed by fairy tales and myth. Spiders, needles, spindles, and mirrors form associative bridges leading the viewer into deeper considerations and the artist's own problematic childhood - her very ill mother when Louise was just a child, her domineering father's betrayal when he took the children's tutor as his mistress. The artist fiercely rejected the interpretation of her work as evolving from dreams: "I don't dream. You might say I work under a spell... The spell is acted out on a physical level; it is not a passive state, like a dream. The dream blinds you; the spell does not." (Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds.) London 1998, p.160). Her work is an encryption of signs, tactile materials, and colours that she regards as more communicative than language. White for example leads back to childhood and innocence while black signifies withdrawal. In her work, strong parallels can be drawn to Yayoi Kusama, another central figure of 20th century art. Both artists were foreign born in New York where they found success as artists, and both shared a deep interest in psychoanalysis at a time where mental health issues were still laden with stigma. Psychological trauma was a source of inspiration for both artists, perhaps most acutely rendered in Kusama's early sculptural masterpiece, Accumulation Number 1, housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The artists returned compulsively to childhood trauma, exploring similar themes of motherhood, sexuality, memory and the body whilst using their art making practice as a form of catharsis to heal.

A spiral is a generative form, a means of order within chaos. The loose coils and circles that make up the base of Untitled from 1997 sprout new growth, a chaotic swirl of forms - close yet far removed from the order and calm of a spider's web. The sharp and powerful totemic protrusion has a threatening edge to it that is only lessened by the soft cluster of round, organic shapes at the top. Looking at the swirling coils, one cannot help but draw parallels to a pile of yarn, a reference to the tapestry restoration workshop Bourgeois' family owned—and the writhing of serpents that takes one back to ancient myth and the serpent-haired medusa who turned men to stone at the glimpse of an eye. The phallic form hovers between the benign and the dangerous, between the nourishing, soft undulating earth from which trees grow and the uncertainty associated with male sexuality and the unresolved relationships of the artist's youth, especially that with her father.

Untitled from 1996 eloquently recalls the metaphors and symbolic dualities that populate Bourgeois' celebrated oeuvre – male and female, nurture and destruction, isolation and integration, embodied in the poetic and raw medium of plaster. Having only found fame in her 70s, Louise Bourgeois' work has since been exhibited widely. In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a retrospective, the first ever retrospective devoted to a female artist, that would bring her widespread public acclaim. In 1989, the first European retrospective of Bourgeois's work opened at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and in 1993, she represented the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale. In 1994, Bourgeois installed her first largescale Spider at the Brooklyn Museum, and in 2000, the Tate Modern in London commissioned her for the inaugural installation of the museum's new location at the Turbine Hall. In 2007, another major retrospective of her work was organized by the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou and it would travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Today, Louise Bourgeois' large scale spiders populate public spaces around the globe and her sculptures, paintings and drawings adorn some of some of the world's biggest public and private collections.