When Tracey Emin first met Louise Bourgeois, the first thing she noticed was her strong and muscular hands. The second thing was her breasts. “She had huge breasts, absolutely huge, and so did I,” the British artist wrote for The Evening Standard in 2022. “We were two women, sitting at this table with our giant breasts, it really turned me on, it’s so weird.”
Relating to: Nightmarish, playful, erotic: Titan Louise Bourgeois’s illuminating Sydney art show
The two became fast friends and, at the end of Bourgeois’s life, collaborated on a series of prints called Do Not Abandon (2009-2010). First, Bourgeois sent Emin a series of watercolors depicting abstract male figures in silhouette with pink swollen bellies, veiny, blackened mounds, and prominent erections. Two years later, when Emin finally gathered the courage, he scribbled in ink his own additions, filled with biting humor and heartfelt sentimentality.
On top of Bourgeois’s watercolor paintings of erect penises, he painted Christ on the cross, a tiny woman crawling on all fours, and even a figure committing suicide by hanging herself on the tip of the penis. Then there was Emin’s big, childish text about loss, love and flesh.
The title of the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) new exhibition, Depths of My Heart, is taken from a doodle by Emin. Featuring 39 works, the one-room exhibition focuses on 20th-century women artists who consumed themselves with questions about the body and offers the chance to showcase some of the gallery’s newest acquisitions, including Do Not Abandon. . (An unrelated, major Bourgeois retrospective is currently on display in Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW.)
The show is part of NGA’s Know My Name initiative, which aims to bring greater gender equality to the gallery’s walls and permanent collection. “We have important information from the great modernist women artists such as Eva Hesse and Sonia Delaunay… but it could be more equal,” says Lucina Ward, the NGA’s curator of international art. “And oddly enough, we have a big difference in the 1990s.”
Concerns about the body have long been a focus of women’s art, but in the West in the 80s this theme dominated sculpture, performance, painting and photography. Much of Deep Inside My Heart features the work of acclaimed artists whose careers first took root in this era—an era when bodily autonomy was defined by losses and gains. The sexual revolution had run its course and had failed in many respects, especially in providing lasting freedom to marginalized communities; The AIDS epidemic stifled sexual freedom and exposed a deliberate failure by governments to act.
This was a period of turmoil in art when minimalist or abstract bodily forms would not work and “a more direct language was required,” as Ward says. Even decades later, these works remain imposing; It contains criticism, comedy and possibilities for our own age of disease and thwarted freedoms.
The exhibition includes works by German-American artist Kiki Smith covering three different periods of her work. The most recent are the large tapestries Earth, Underground and Sky (2012), in which a naked woman connects with the fertility of the earth; winding tree branches, snakes and marble pebbles. The triptych appears to present a reconstructed image of Eve without the torment of sin. Instead, Eve is joyfully immersed in nature and enjoys the privilege of seeing it all; It is adorned with eyes attached to its thighs.
These folkloric elements extend to Smith’s large-scale drawings, where feet and spindly figures look as if they are about to crack and crumple like delicate paper canvases. Something more solid but no less disorderly is found in Smith’s 1993 sculpture Untitled III (Beaded Upside Down Torso). Translucent beads stretch like DNA across the floor and encircle a crouching, messily draped bronze figure; here the body is made unruly, but also rough-hewn, a site that forever bears the shards of labor and disaster.
Rotten, broken and abandoned flesh was never far from Smith’s mind. He trained as an emergency medical technician in the 80s and witnessed his sister and friends succumb to premature deaths from AIDS-related complications.
Elsewhere the body has been made more playfully interchangeable. Lynda Benglis’s rust-colored Untitled (Polly’s Pie II) sits on the gallery floor, a sloppy pile of coagulated polyurethane foam (part of the “fallen paintings” series) that has been in the NGA’s collection for decades.
“Benglis is very interested in the machismo of this movement [in art]. He acknowledges the gesture and says, ‘Look, I’m going to make a gestural painting, but without the canvas and the stretcher, and it’s just going to sit on the floor and be there,'” says Ward.
Polly’s Pie is a companion piece to Indonesian painter I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih’s work, where legs and necks are twisted and stretched to comical, sensual extremes, mocking the inherent frailties of desire and the limitations placed on women’s sexuality. .
“The idea of body parts and disembodied bodies is very important to all these artists,” says Ward. “Show [asks] What happens internally within a body, both in the sense of mimetic, imaginary, and muscle memory, but also what happens to the body when it is not self-sufficient?
There is an area devoted to early works by Australian sculptor Bronwyn Oliver, known for her web-like metal sculptures, among works by other respected international artists (such as Sarah Lucas, Marlene Dumas, Ana Mendieta and Nancy Spero). The collection displayed here was made in 1984 while he was studying at Chelsea School of Art in London.
These are tantalizing, unnerving objects that look like long-lost artifacts of an extinct species; skeletal, shell-like and toothed. “I set out to strip ideas and associations down to their bones (physically and metaphorically),” he once said of his practice, “uncovering the life still held within.”
-
Deep Inside My Heart is open at the National Gallery of Australia Canberra until May 2024. Guardian Australia went to Canberra as a guest of the NGA.