NYAB Event - Louise Bourgeois "The Fabric Works"

Louise Bourgeois "The Fabric Works"

Cheim & Read

This event has ended.

Dating from 2002 – 2010, Bourgeois’s fabric “drawings” - assembled from discarded clothes, sheets, towels and similar material from her personal collection - became a central focus in the last decade of her life. Significant in their own right for their formal invention and beauty, the drawings constitute a parallel body of work to that of her fabric sculptures.

Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She moved to New York in 1938 and lived in the city until her death last year at age 98. Her works on fabric are emblematic of certain themes: marriage, motherhood, sexuality, femininity, domesticity. This focus on the familial results in work of intense psychological complexity, exposing relationships and hierarchies related to female identity and its opposite (male/female, mother/father, organic/geometric, rigid/pliable). Coinciding with an inclination, at old age, to stay closer to home, Bourgeois’s late fabric works provide a sense of introspection – her wardrobe and linen closet became representative of memory. As Bourgeois has stated, “Clothing is…an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past…like little signposts in the search for the past.” The re-appropriation of her husband’s handkerchiefs, stained tablecloths and napkins, and worn dresses from all phases of her life infuses the work with a confessional, talismanic aura.

Bourgeois’s use of fabric also references her personal history. She grew up in her parent’s tapestry restoration business, her childhood surrounded by the reparation of 17th and 18th century textiles. Bourgeois’s peripatetic, philandering father sought out fragmentary, often damaged tapestries, while her mother, patient, reasonable, and, as Bourgeois notes, more “scientific,” would match their colors, dye new wool and painstakingly re-weave them. Bourgeois was a valued participant in the process – beginning at age 8 she drew in missing sections needing repair, and at 15 her parents took her out of school so that she could have more professional experience in the family business. Bourgeois’s later fabric collages and assemblages – their many disparate pieces assembled and sewed together – attest to the early influence of this restorative process, as well as to the conceptual and psychological connotations of the words associated with it: cut, unravel, weave, knot, stitch, mend. Bourgeois said, “I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”

Media

• Drawing
• Other

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