Louise Bourgeois "A Life in Pictures"
Guggenheim Museum
This event has ended.
On the occasion of her retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, Louise Bourgeois published a photo essay in Artforum magazine that revealed the impact of childhood trauma on her art. “Everything I do,” she exclaimed, “was inspired by my early life.”
Bourgeois’s diaries, which she has kept assiduously since 1923, indicate the tensions between rage, fear of abandonment, and guilt that she has suffered since childhood. In Bourgeois’s universe, art is a recuperative practice; it can invoke and heal the deepest emotional wounds. With this understanding, it is impossible to consider her richly symbolic oeuvre independently from the story of her life, which is documented in this exhibition with photographs, journals, and identification cards from her personal archives. A selection of images provides an overview of Bourgeois’s biography, illustrating the many intersecting and overlapping roles she has played, including venturesome student, dutiful daughter, loving wife and mother, and maverick artist whose work is ever contemporary and relevant to the times.
Media
Schedule
from June 27, 2008 to September 12, 2008