Louise Bourgeois – Recent Works

Louise Bourgeois is, in every sense, an extraordinary artist. At the age of 86, she has tirelessly renewed her sculptural expressions, continuously delving deeper into the layers of her own subconscious. She remains one of the most intriguing and sought-after figures in contemporary art.

Her artistic practice is marked by recurring themes: the home, childhood, the past, motherhood, and sexuality. She weaves these elements together with eroticism and death, themes that have become increasingly prominent in her work.

Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition at Malmö Konsthall featured works from 1993 to 1998, many of which revolve around her reckoning with childhood and her parents, with textiles playing a striking role. One key group of works includes Poles, first exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 1996. These installations are made from her own clothing or sewn together as assemblages of fabric. Another group consists of her Red Rooms, representing the parents’ room, the nursery—spaces where she gathers and combines hand-embroidered fabrics, threads, and spools. These works were initiated in 1994. Her engagement with textiles then led to the Spiders series, first appearing as drawings and later transformed into monumental sculptures. A third group of works takes the form of distorted figures, either displayed individually or as pairs.

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois has lived in the United States since 1938. Although long recognized in New York, her international breakthrough came in the 1980s. Today, she is represented in most major contemporary art collections worldwide. Her most recent large-scale retrospective was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1995. The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, which featured around twenty significant works, was her first major exhibition in the Nordic region.