Deep underground in the Tank gallery of the Art Gallery of NSW, eighty-something artist Louise Bourgeois peels a tangerine in images projected on the wall. This is not a snack, but an indication of a formative and damaging childhood experience; She begins by drawing an outline of a female figure on the skin with a thick black pencil, before drawing lines with a knife and opening the fruit’s skin.
The tangerine routine was a party trick that Bourgeois’ father performed at Sunday dinners during his childhood, often in front of guests; “I am painting a small portrait of my daughter,” he would announce. The belly button would be left until the end for a different look: after all, it’s not a girl, but a boy with a thin penis. “Well, I’m sorry my daughter doesn’t display such beauty,” she would exclaim.
The Young Bourgeois was ashamed; He couldn’t remember if the adults were laughing at him, but he felt as if they were. “And the pain was immense.”
The documentary clip is part of the gallery’s massive summer exhibition of work by the late French-American artist, spanning two levels and nearly 130 works. As Bourgeois tells the story, his sculptor’s hands move confidently over the fruit, taking command as only a master storyteller can. I am stunned. In the end, the artist barely holds back his tears; She regressed to a little girl, wounded and humiliated by her father’s everyday, sexualized cruelty.
The chapter reveals Bourgeois’s practice, personality, and psychology. And it reveals the vulnerable essence of an art giant better known for his prickly public persona and frightening Lovecraftian spider sculptures. It is fitting that this clip is buried deep within the exhibition: we must pass through beauty, mud and analysis to reach enlightenment. Further up the wall is Bourgeois’s revenge-fantasy painting The Destruction of the Father: a red-lit alcove in which pale, protruding forms gather around a table (a hole, a womb, an oven, or a cave? bed?) covered in chunks of flesh. Watching nearby is a spider the size of an army tank, a loving representation of its mother.
Justin Paton, AGNSW’s chief curator of international art, says he feels “like Tank was waiting for Louise, or Louise was waiting for Tank.” This feels like a match made in heaven (or hell, as the artist would probably say), especially because of Bourgeois’s preoccupation with vaults, shafts, darkness, and the abyss.
This exhibition, which opened on Saturday, is the first solo exhibition to be hosted by AGNSW’s new gallery, nicknamed “Sydney Modern” but still without a name. Paton structured the show around the duality of day and night, taking a cue from a line in Bourgeois’s brief print series What is the Shape of This Question?: “Did the day invade the night, or did the night invade the day?” (This is also the not-at-all-catchy title of the exhibition).
Upstairs, in a series of white cube spaces, viewers wander through the artist’s life and work, from his groundbreaking 1940s sculpture series Personages to his two iconic cage-like Cell installations and homage textile works in the 1990s and 2000s. to her mother’s work as a seamstress and tapestry maker.
Hands, spirals, breasts, blades and spools of thread abound. There are dreamy paintings of body parts abstracted in fleshy pink watercolors and blood reds; sex, motherhood and brutality are everywhere.
Then, as you descend the spiral staircase into Tank, you are faced with a series of powerful forms – nightmarish, playful, erotic, tender – without text or explanation: the strange fruits of Bourgeois’s spirit.
Suspended centrally within the chamber’s seven-metre-high matrix of concrete pillars, the headless golden figure leans backwards as if tumbling underwater. It’s a show-stopping moment, among a few, but there are also quieter touches: a five-legged cat lurking; a spider climbs a wall; and small gouache works on paper from the gorgeous, gory The Feeding series (mothers will feel it on their nipples).
Paton suggests moving from day to night, but there is also a strong case for the opposite: dive first into the dank, subconscious depths before retreating into the bright field of personal history and psychological interpretation; This inevitably undermines the mystery of Bourgeois’s artworks and jeopardizes the viewer’s chances. for a primitive, instinctive response.
Bourgeois’s art was rooted in his childhood, particularly the deep emotional scars left by his relationships with his parents. She felt abandoned by her mother, who died in 1932 when Louise was only 20; She felt betrayed by her father, a prolific womanizer.
The art he arrived at in his mid-20s, after earning a degree in philosophy and abandoning the study of mathematics, was a way to process this trauma and his changing relationship with it (he excelled at psychoanalysis, which later influenced his art). While he made peace with his mother (the famous mother now commemorated in Maman, the giant spider sculpture that stands in the forecourt of the Art Gallery’s 19th-century building), he never forgave his father.
Bourgeois also seemed to struggle with self-forgiveness. She described herself as a “runaway girl”: as a young woman, she had abandoned her family in France, then on the brink of war, to move to New York with her then-new husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater.
They adopted a son and had two more in quick succession, and Bourgeois’s early artworks occupied a chaotic domestic space where cooking and cleaning took a backseat. (After her husband’s death in 1973, Bourgeois removed the stove, divided the dining table into two to make a desk, and turned the entire house into her own studio, writing on the walls). She did not identify as a feminist, but was praised by many artists who did; a group of them petitioned New York’s MoMA to give Bourgeois his first solo exhibition in 1973; It was a turning point that frustratingly came late in his career, in 1982.
It feels like Bourgeois is everywhere these days. In Australia this year alone, his work has been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria and in upcoming group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian Center for Contemporary Art. And it’s no wonder: his art, raw, meticulous and bold, grapples with nothing but the human condition.
Bourgeois, who died in 2010, took his rightful place as a giant among the artists of every period.