Louise Bourgeois
June 25 — October 31, 2024
1 Untitled, 1991, yellow ink on paper, 22.2 x 29.8 cm
2 Untitled, 1998, pencil on paper, 20.3 x 24.4 cm
3 Untitled, 1994, ink on paper, 31.4 x 31.4 cm
4 Untitled, 2003, watercolor on paper, 20.3 x 24.1 cm
5 Untitled, 1970, watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm
6 Nature Study #1, 1985, bronze, silver nitrate and polished patina, 17.8 x 48.3 x 17.8 cm, ed. 3/6 + 1 AP
7 Drive Through Trees, 1995, ink, charcoal and pencil on paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
8 Untitled, 1991, black ink on red paper, 24.1 x 11.4 cm
9 Untitled, 1970, ink on paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
10 Eyelets, 1988, ink on blue paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm
11 Untitled, 1994, chalk and gouache on paper, 48.3 x 63.5 cm
12 Mirror, 1994, watercolor and pencil on paper, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
13 Untitled, 1994, gouache and pencil on red paper, 24.1 x 10.5 cm
14 Untitled, 2002, watercolor on paper, 29.2 x 22.9 cm
15 Untitled, 2003, watercolor on paper, 20.3 x 24.1 cm
16 Father and Son, 2004, watercolor on paper, 36.2 x 23.5 cm
17 Untitled, 1947, ink and pencil on paper, 29.2 x 18.4 cm
18 Untitled n. 6, 1998, bronze, silver nitrate patina, 8.9 x 50.8 x 48.3 cm, ed. 3/6 + 1 AP
19 Untitled, 1995, watercolor and ink on paper, 22.5 x 30.2 cm
20 Untitled, 2003, watercolor on paper, 24.1 x 20.3 cm
21 Untitled, 1980, blue ballpoint on pink paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
22 You Control Your Thoughts but Your Thoughts Control Your Emotions, 1999, pencil on paper, 20.3 x 24.1 cm
23 Untitled, 1969, crayon, watercolor and gouache on paper, 25.1 x 29.2 cm
24 Untitled, 1997, red ink and pencil on paper, 22.9 x 29.5 cm
25 Untitled, 1987, pencil on paper, 22.9 x 29.8 cm
26 Spit or Star, 1986, watercolor and pencil on paper, 60.3 x 48.3 cm
27 Untitled, 2003, watercolor and gouache on paper, 23.2 x 20.3 cm
28 The Feeding, 2007, gouache on paper, 59.7 x 45.7 cm
29 The Good Mother, 2008, gouache on paper, 59.7 x 45.7 cm
30 Self Portrait, 2007, gouache on paper, 59.4 x 45.4 cm
31 Untitled, 1991, pencil and purple ink on paper, 22.9 x 29.2 cm
32 Untitled, 1995, ink, crayon and colored pencil on paper, 30.2 x 22.5 cm
33 Untitled, 1988, ink and pencil on graph paper, 43.2 x 27.9 cm
34 Untitled, 2000 ca, watercolor on paper, 28.6 x 35.6 cm
35 Untitled, 2005, bronze, silver nitrate patina 17.1 x 36.8 x 30.5 cm, ed. 5/6 + 1 AP
For Louise Bourgeois, drawing was a lifelong pursuit and necessity — like the daily writing of her diary.
As a young girl, she drew in the missing parts of tapestries which her mother repaired and her father sold in the family gallery.
As part of her artistic education in Paris, she drew live models at the École des beaux arts.
Once in New York, her drawings between 1940 and 1950 reveal a gradual shift from realism to abstraction. The repetitive quality of her markmaking was crucial to their realization, bringing a physicality to the process. The works themselves range from notational sketches to fully realized drawings, very few of which correspond directly to her sculpture.
In the late 1960s, the black ink of her earlier drawings gives way to coloured landscapes of undulating forms and accumulations that at times resemble body parts such as breasts.
The drawings of the 1980s, though various in imagery, witness a return to realism alongside the pursuit of abstraction. They frequently feature writing on both front and back.
The late red gouaches depict the various aspects of motherhood — insemination, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and the good mother — combining the pathological with the universal, fact with fiction, abstraction with realism, randomness with control.
More broadly, making a drawing for Bourgeois didn’t evoke the body in the same way as making a sculpture, but instead offered her an immediacy of psychological release and an intimacy of expression — another means of communicating her conflicting emotions. To pin down her memories, to re-experience the emotions of a specific time and place, to relive and perhaps to discharge emotional turmoil: the drawings are heavily involved in the mechanisms of memory and catharsis that the artist sought through her art making.
Extending over 70 years, Bourgeois’s drawings constitute an eccentric and original alphabet of forms and motifs — a rare language with a beauty and a mystery all its own.