Aziz Art
January 2019
Abbas Kowsari Parastou Forouhar
Louise Bourgeois
1-Louise Bourgeois 16-Parastou Forouhar 21-Abbas Kowsari
Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010 was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process.
in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn. The lower part of the tapestries were always damaged which was usually the characters' feet and animals' paws. Many of Bourgeois's works have extremely fragile and frail feet which could be a result of the former.
In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Although Bourgeois exhibited with Sorbonne to study mathematics the Abstract Expressionists and her and geometry, subjects that she work has much in common with valued for their stability, saying "I Surrealism and Feminist art, she got peace of mind, only through was not formally affiliated with a the study of rules nobody could particular artistic movement. change." Early life Bourgeois was born on 25 Her mother died in 1932, while December 1911 in Paris, France. Bourgeois was studying She was the second child of three mathematics. Her mother's death born to parents inspired her to abandon Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis mathematics and to begin studying Bourgeois. She had an older sister art. and a younger brother.Her parents 1 owned a gallery that dealt primarily
She continued to study art by joining classes where translators were needed for English-speaking students, in which those translators were not charged tuition. In one such class Fernand Léger saw her work and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter.
profession.
Bourgeois graduated from the Sorbonne 1935. She began studying art in Paris, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and École du Louvre, and after 1932 in the independent academies of Montparnasse and Montmartre such as Académie Colarossi, Académie Ranson, Académie Julian, Académie de la Grande Chaumière and with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, Paul Colin and Cassandre.
"The first painting had a grid: the grid is a very peaceful thing because nothing can go wrong ... everything is complete. There is no room for anxiety ... everything has a place, everything is welcome."
Bourgeois had a desire for firsthand experience, and frequently visited studios in Paris, learning techniques from the artists and assisting with exhibitions. Bourgeois briefly opened a print store beside her father's tapestry workshop. Her father helped her on the grounds that she had entered into a commerce-driven
Bourgeois emigrated to New York City in 1938. She studied at the Art Students League of New York, studying painting under Vaclav Vytlacil, and also producing sculptures and prints.
Bourgeois incorporated those autobiographical references to her sculpture Quarantania I, on display in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Middle years For Bourgeois the early 1940s represented the difficulties of a transition to a new country and the struggle to enter the exhibition world of New York City. Her work during this time was constructed from junkyard scraps and driftwood which she used to carve upright wood sculptures.
The impurities of the wood were then camouflaged with paint, after which nails were employed to invent holes and scratches in the endeavor to portray some emotion. The Sleeping Figure is one such example which depicts a war figure that is unable to face the real world due to vulnerability. Throughout her life, Bourgeois's work was created from revisiting of her own troubled past as she found inspiration and temporary catharsis from her childhood years and the abuse she suffered from her father. Slowly she developed more artistic confidence, although her middle years are more opaque, which might be due to the fact that she received very little attention from the art world despite having her first solo show in 1945.She became an American citizen in 1951. In 1954, Bourgeois joined the American Abstract Artists Group, with several contemporaries, among them Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. At this time she also befriended the artists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.
As part of the American Abstract Artists Group, Bourgeois made the transition from wood and upright structures to marble, plaster and bronze as she investigated concerns like fear, vulnerability and loss of control. This transition was a turning point. She referred to her art as a series or sequence closely related to days and circumstances, describing her early work as the fear of falling which later transformed into the art of falling and the final evolution as the art of hanging in there. Her conflicts in real life empowered her to authenticate her experiences and struggles through a unique art form. In 1958, Bourgeois and her husband moved into a terraced house at West 20th Street, in Chelsea, Manhattan, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois's subject was the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso selfportrait (1963-1964), Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the feminine body.
In the late 1960's, her imagery became more explicitly sexual as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. Sexually explicit sculptures such as Janus Fleuri, (1968) show she was not afraid to use the female form in new ways. She has been quoted to say "My work deals with problems that are pre-gender," she wrote. "For example, jealousy is not male or female." With the rise of feminism, her work found a wider audience. Despite this assertion, in 1976 Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard's book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art and became an icon of the feminist art movement. Later life In 1973, Bourgeois started teaching at the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. From 1974 until 1977, Bourgeois worked at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she taught printmaking and
sculpture.She also taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island. In the early 1970s, Bourgeois would hold gatherings called "Sunday, bloody Sundays" at her home in Chelsea. These salons would be filled with young artists and students whose work would be critiqued by Bourgeois. Bourgeois ruthlessness in critique and her dry sense of humor lead to the naming of these meetings. Bourgeois inspired many young students to make art that was feminist in nature.However, Louise's long-time friend and assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, has stated that Louise considered her own work "pre-gender". Bourgeois aligned herself with activists and became a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective founded by fellow artist Anita Steckel. In the 1970s, the group defended the use of sexual imagery in artwork.Steckel argued, "If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women."
In 1978 Bourgeois was commissioned by the General Services Administration to create Facets of the Sun, her first public sculpture.The work was installed outside of a federal building in Manchester, New Hampshire. Bourgeois received her first retrospective in 1982, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Until then, she had been a peripheral figure in art whose work was more admired than acclaimed. In an interview with Artforum, timed to coincide with the opening of her retrospective, she revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was wholly autobiographical. She shared with the world that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, as a child, that her English governess was also her father's mistress.
the organizers did not consider Bourgeois's work of significant importance to include in the survey.However, this survey was criticized for many omissions, with one critic writing that "whole sections of the best American art have been wiped out" and pointing out that very few women were included. In 2000 her works were selected to be shown at the opening of the Tate Modern in London.In 2001, she showed at the Hermitage Museum.
In 2010, in the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. She created the piece I Do, depicting two flowers growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization Freedom to Marry. Bourgeois has said "Everyone should have the right to marry. To Bourgeois had another make a commitment to love retrospective in 1989 at someone forever is a beautiful Documenta 9 in Kassel, thing."Bourgeois had a history of Germany.In 1993, when the Royal activism on behalf of LGBT equality, Academy of Arts staged its having created artwork for the AIDS comprehensive survey of activist organization ACT UP in American art in the 20th century, 1993.
Death Bourgeois died of heart failure on 31 May 2010, at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.Wendy Williams, the managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio, announced her death. She had continued to create artwork until her death, her last pieces being finished the week before. The New York Times said that her work "shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world."
Bourgeois explores the relationship of a woman and the home. In the works, women's heads have been replaced with houses, isolating their bodies from the outside world and keeping their minds domestic. This theme goes along with the dehumanization of modern art.
Destruction of the Father Destruction of the Father (1974) is a biographical and a psychological exploration of the power dominance of father and his offspring. The piece is a flesh-toned Her husband, Robert Goldwater, installation in a soft and womb-like died in 1973. She was survived by room. Made of plaster, latex, wood, two sons, fabric, and red light, Destruction of Alain Bourgeois and Jean-Louis the Father was the first piece in Bourgeois. Her first son, Michel, which she used soft materials on a died in 1990. large scale. Upon entering the installation, the viewer stands in Work the aftermath of a crime. Set in a See also: List of artworks by Louise stylized dining room (with the dual Bourgeois impact of a bedroom), the abstract Femme Maison blob-like children of an overbearing Main article: Femme Maison father have rebelled, murdered, and eaten him. Femme Maison (1946–47) is a series of paintings in which
telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. There is tragedy in the air. Once too often he has said his piece. He is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself. A kind of resentment grows and one day my brother and I decided, 'the time has come!' We grabbed him, laid him on the table and with our knives dissected him. We took him apart and dismembered him, we cut off his penis. And he became food. We ate him up he was liquidated the same way he liquidated the children
She felt she could get in touch with issues of female identity, the body, the fractured family, long before the art world and society considered them expressed subjects in art. This was Bourgeous's way to find her center and stabilize her emotional unrest. The New York Times said at the time that "her work is charged with tenderness and violence, acceptance and defiance, ambivalence and conviction."
Cells While in her eighties, Bourgeois produced two series of enclosed installation works she referred to as Exorcism in Art Cells. Many are small enclosures In 1982, The Museum of Modern into which the viewer is prompted Art in New York City featured to peer inward at arrangements of unknown artist, symbolic objects; others are small Louise Bourgeois's work. She was rooms into which the viewer is 70 years old and a mixed media invited to enter. In the cell pieces, artist who worked on paper, with Bourgeois uses earlier sculptural metal, marble and animal skeletal forms, found objects as well as bones. Childhood family traumas personal items that carried strong "bred an exorcism in art" and she personal emotional charge for the desperately attempted to purge artist. her unrest with her work.
The cells enclose psychological made by Bourgeois. Moreover, and intellectual states, primarily Maman feelings of fear and pain. alludes to the strength of her Bourgeois stated that the Cells mother, with metaphors of represent "different types of pain; spinning, weaving, nurture and physical, emotional and protection. The prevalence of the psychological, mental and spider motif in her work has given intellectual ... Each rise to her nickname as Cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain ... Spiderwoman. Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking The Spider is an ode to my mother. and being looked at." She was my best friend. Like a Maman spider, my mother was a weaver. Main article: Maman (sculpture) My family was in the business of In the late 1990s, Bourgeois began tapestry restoration, and my using the spider as a central image mother was in charge of the in her art. Maman, which stands workshop. Like spiders, my mother more than nine metres high, is a was very clever. Spiders are friendly steel and marble sculpture from presences that eat mosquitoes. We which an edition of six bronzes know that mosquitoes spread were subsequently cast. It first diseases and are therefore made an appearance as part of unwanted. So, spiders are helpful Bourgeois's commission for The and protective, just like my mother. Unilever Series for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000, and recently, Maisons fragiles / Empty Houses the sculpture was installed at the Bourgeois's Maisons fragiles / Qatar National Convention Centre Empty Houses sculptures are in Doha, Qatar.[35] Her largest parallel, high metallic structures spider sculpture titled Maman supporting a simple tray. One must stands at over 30 feet (9.1 m) and see them in person to feel their has been installed in numerous impact. They are not threatening or locations around the world.It is protecting, but bring out the the largest Spider sculpture ever depths of anxiety within you.
Bachelard's findings from psychologists' tests show that an anxious child will draw a tall narrow house with no base. Bourgeois had a rocky/traumatic childhood and this could support the reason behind why these pieces were constructed. Printmaking Bourgeois's printmaking flourished during the early and late phases of her career: in the 1930s and 1940s, when she first came to New York from Paris, and then again starting in the 1980s, when her work began to receive wide recognition. Early on, she made prints at home on a small press, or at the renowned workshop Atelier 17. That period was followed by a long hiatus, as Bourgeois turned her attention fully to sculpture. It was not until she was in her seventies that she began to make prints again, encouraged first by print publishers. She set up her old press, and added a second, while also working closely with printers who came to her house to collaborate. A very active phase of printmaking followed, lasting until the artist's death. Over the course
of her life, Bourgeois created approximately 1,500 printed compositions. In 1990, Bourgeois decided to donate the complete archive of her printed work to The Museum of Modern Art. In 2013, The Museum launched the online catalogue raisonnĂŠ, "Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books." The site focuses on the artist's creative process and places Bourgeois's prints and illustrated books within the context of her overall production by including related works in other mediums that deal with the same themes and imagery. Pervasive themes One theme of Bourgeois's work is that of childhood trauma and hidden emotion. After Louise's mother became sick with influenza Louise's father began having affairs with other women, most notably with Sadie, Louise's English tutor. Louise was extremely watchful and aware of the situation. This was the beginning of the artist's engagement with double standards related to gender and sexuality, which was expressed in much of her work. She recalls her father saying
"I love you" repeatedly to her mother, despite infidelity. "He was the wolf, and she was the rational hare, forgiving and accepting him as he was. "Her 1993 work "Cell: You Better Grow Up", part of her "Cell" series, speaks directly to Louise's childhood trauma and the insecurity that surrounded her. 2002's "Give or Take" is defined by hidden emotion, representing the intense dilemma that people face throughout their lives as they attempt to balance the actions of giving and taking. This dilemma is not only represented by the shape of the sculpture, but also the heaviness of the material this piece is made of.
including living across from a slaughterhouse and her father's affair. To Louise her father represented injury and war, aggrandizement of himself and belittlement of others and most importantly a man who represented betrayal. Her 1993 work "Cell (Three White Marble Spheres)" speaks to fear and captivity. The mirrors within the present an altered and distorted reality.
Sexuality is undoubtedly one of the most important themes in the work of Louise Bourgeois. The link between sexuality and fragility or insecurity is also powerful. It has been argued that this stems from her childhood memories and her Architecture and memory are father's affairs. 1952's "Spiral important components of Woman" combines Louise's focus Bourgeois's work. In numerous on female sexuality and torture. interviews, Louise describes The flexing leg and arm muscles architecture as a visual expression indicate that the Spiral Woman is of memory, or memory as a type still above though she is being of architecture. The memory suffocated and hung. 1995's "In which is featured in much of her and Out" uses cold metal materials work is an invented memory to link sexuality with anger and about the death or exorcism of perhaps even captivity. her father. The imagined memory is interwoven with her real memories
The spiral in her work demonstrates the dangerous search for precarious equilibrium, accident-free permanent change, disarray, vertigo, whirlwind. There lies the simultaneously positive and negative, both future and past, breakup and return, hope and vanity, plan and memory. Louise Bourgeois's work is powered by confessions, self-portraits, memories, fantasies of a restless being who is seeking through her sculpture a peace and an order which were missing throughout her childhood.
Parastou Forouhar born 1962 in Tehran is an Iranian installation artist who lives and works out of Frankfurt, Germany. Forouhar’s art reflects her criticism of the Iranian government and often plays with the ideas of identity. Her artwork expresses a critical response towards the politics in Iran and Islamic Fundamentalism. The loss of her parents fuels Forouhar’s work and challenges viewers to take a stand on war crimes against innocent citizens. Forouhar's work has been exhibited around the world including Iran, Germany, Russia, Turkey, England, United States and more. Early life and education The daughter of political activist Parvaneh Forouhar and politician Dariush Forouhar, Parastou was born in 1962 in Tehran, Iran. Her father critiqued the Iranian government and he founded and led the Hezb-e-Mellat-e Iran (Nation Party of Iran), which was a pan-Iranist opposition party in Iran. Her parents were stabbed in their home in the November of 1998,
and Parastou relocated to Germany in 1991, where she has continued her work.She lives in exile because she is considered a political threat by the Iranian government.After her parents' death, Parastou channeled her grief into her art, her art explores topics from democracy to woman's rights to her parents' murder.Parastou studied Art at the University of Tehran from 1984 until 1990, where she earned her B.A., she then continued to study at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main in Germany and went on to earn her M.A. in 1994.Parastou lives with her two children in Frankfurt Germany now. Work Forouhar's work is autobiographical in nature and responds to the politics that have shaped and defined contemporary Iranian citizenship both in Iran and abroad.She works within a range of media including site specific installation, animation, digital drawing, photography, signs and products. Through her work 16
she processes very real experiences of loss, pain, and state-sanctioned violence through animations, wallpapers, flipbooks, and drawings.Forouhar uses culturally specific motifs found within traditional Iranian arts such as Islamic calligraphy and Persian miniature painting to question the ways these forms can generate a lack of individual agency while adhering to a standardized understanding of beauty and cultural identity Forouhar's work is a utobiographical in nature and responds to the politics that have shaped and defined contemporary Iranian citizenship both in Iran and abroad. She works within a range of media including site specific installation, animation, digital drawing, photography, signs and products. Through her work, she processes very real experiences of loss, pain, and state-sanctioned violence through animations, wallpapers, flipbooks, and drawings. Forouhar uses culturally specific motifs found within traditional Iranian arts such as Islamic calligraphy and Persian
miniature painting to question the ways these forms can generate a lack of individual agency while adhering to a standardized understanding of beauty and cultural identity. In 2012 she received the Sophie von La Roche Award in recognition for her work that confronts issues concerning displacement, gender and cultural identity. Solo exhibitions of Forouhar's work have been held at Stavanger Cultural Center, Norway; Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin; City Museum, Crailsheim, Germany; and German Cathedral, Berlin.She has participated in group exhibitions at Schim Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Frauenmuseum Bonn; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, Joanneum, Graz, Austria; House of World Cultures, Berlin; Deutsches HygieneMuseum, Dresden; Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne; and Jewish Museum San Francisco.
Her work can be found in the following permanent collections: The Queensland Art Museum, Queensland; Belvedere, Vienna; Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; and the Deutsche Bank Art Collection.
In 2002, the Iranian Cultural Ministry censored Forouhar's photo exhibition, Blind Spot, a collection of images depicting a veiled, gender-neutral figure with a bulbous, featureless face. Forouhar chose to exhibit the empty frames on the wall on opening night instead of forgoing the show.
Forouhar and her brother got involved in activism after their parents got brutally murdered and they weren't allowed to publicly mourn or speak out about their deaths. Her artwork critiques the Iranian government and focuses on examining her identity and culture. Forouhar has been featured in several art fairs including the Brodsky Center Fair, at Rutgers University in 2015, and Pi Artworks fair Istanbul/London, in 2016 and 2017 (she was at both locations: in Contemporary Istanbul and London)
Abbas Kowsari was born in 1970, in Iran. He graduated in 1988 with a diploma from Shariati High School in Tehran, where he continues to live and work. Kowsari has worked for over ten leading Iranian newspapers, most of them now banned from publishing. He currently works as the senior photo editor for E’temad newspaper in Tehran.
His photos have been published in Paris Match, Der Spiegel and Colors magazine of Benetton, along with several other international publications. PHOTOGRAPHY 2006-present Photo Editor E’temad Newspaper 2007-present Photo Editor Sarmayeh Economics Newspaper 2003-present Photo Editor Haft Monthly Arts Magazine –Closed Down Exhibitions 2008 Shade of Water – Shade of Earth, Aaran Art Gallery Tehran 2004 Muslims Muslims, La Vilette Paris 2003 Portraits, French Embassy Damascus 2002 Iran Contemporary Photographers, Assar Art Gallery Tehran
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