The landmark artist\u2019s very first solo exhibition in this country presents an intimate view of an extraordinary woman.<\/p>\n
For the very first time, there\u2019s a Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Aotearoa. It\u2019s a close look into the long life and career of an iconic, larger-than-life figure of contemporary art.<\/p>\n
First, a spiral. It\u2019s sketchy, purple and huge on the fleshy pink wall. Overlaid onto it in vinyl lettering is \u201cLouise Bourgeois: In Private View\u201d. Then, at the end of a short, dark passageway is the woman herself. A wall-to-wall black-and-white photograph shows Louise Bourgeois, in the later years of her life, laughing as she is embraced \u2013 or entrapped \u2013 by the spiky legs of one of her supersized spider sculptures. Beyond is the very first solo exhibition of the artist\u2019s work to be shown in Aotearoa. It\u2019s open, and free, until May 2026. The exhibition charts the scope of her long career and life (each inseparable from the other), and marks important turning points from her first show of paintings in New York in 1945, to a fabric work made in 2010, the last year of her life.<\/p>\n
Louise Bourgeois with her sculpture on the roof of her apartment building, New York, circa 1944. Photo: \u00a9 The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS\/Copyright Agency, 2025<\/p>\n
It is hard to describe Louise Bourgeois\u2019 work and impact without falling into superlatives. When I was at art school a few years ago, a tome of her work was so sought after, it was guarded as \u201cin-library use only\u201d. Some of my friends and I would simply refer to her as \u201cLB\u201d, mimicking the neatly stitched letters she marked her works with. Bourgeois is among the most notable artists of the 20th century, but can\u2019t be defined by a movement, although she came into contact with many \u2013 surrealism, abstract expressionism, modernism, eccentric abstraction, postmodernism and the feminist art movement. \u201cShe would duck and cover from almost every grouping that she was associated with,\u201d says Natasha Conland, senior curator of global contemporary art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki. We\u2019ve met to look at the works and discuss the woman behind them on the eve of the exhibition\u2019s opening. \u201cShe could have at almost any point joined a movement and become its star \u2013 but she didn\u2019t. She sets herself apart, and she really uses her voice to find herself\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris and grew up helping her parents restore and mend tapestries. When her mother died in 1932, Bourgeois gave up studying mathematics and turned to art. She studied in a number of French institutions and apprenticed under master artists until she met Robert Goldwater, a renowned art historian from the US in 1936. They fell in love and by 1938 they were married and living in New York. Her solo exhibitions began with paintings, but it\u2019s in sculpture that her work really comes into its own. The first works you encounter at In Private View are the genesis of her sculpture practice, the Personages from the late 1940s. The pole-like figures are minimalist representations of the people she left behind in France. They\u2019re elegant, and yet the most striking has a cluster of heavy nails rammed into where we imagine its mouth to be. The Personages were made on the roof of her home in New York \u2013 downstairs were three sons, and all the work that comes with mothering.<\/p>\n
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2004, fabric, wool, steel, on loan from a private collection. \u00a9 The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS\/Copyright Agency, 2025<\/p>\n
The death of Bourgeois\u2019 father in 1951 brings an end to this era, and to the first room of the exhibition. For 11 years Bourgeois stopped showing work, dropped from public view and underwent psychoanalysis. The second room of In Private View shows the visceral, symbolic, enigmatic and powerfully human work that emerged after that period. Here are the materials, textures, and motifs that Bourgeois is most known for. Yes, there\u2019s a spider \u2013 but here the spider sits as a small part of Bourgeois\u2019 oeuvre. I was far more taken with Lair (1962), a white, messy sculpture about the size of a wedding cake. The spiral construction holds the marks of her hands and fingers as it spirals unevenly upwards. \u201cA spiral represents somewhere that you might get stuck, but it can also be a safe place,\u201d says Conland, \u201cit\u2019s somewhere you can retreat to, but it also makes you vulnerable\u201d. Spirals come up again and again in Bourgeois work. One of the artwork labels describes how the form reminded her of washing tapestries in the river as a child, twisting the material to wring out the water, and in daydreams wringing the neck of her father\u2019s mistress.<\/p>\n
Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2003, aluminum, on loan from a private collection. Photo: Christopher Burke, \u00a9 The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS\/Copyright Agency, 2025<\/p>\n
Bourgeois was tight-lipped about her personal life until she was 71 \u2013 then it all came pouring out. The dam broke in an autobiographical presentation that accompanied her first retrospective at a notable institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. For 10 years her father, a dominating figure, carried out an affair with the English tutor who lived at their house. At the end of the second room of In Private View, Bourgeois\u2019 gravelly voice rings out, telling the story which is understood as an origin story for her art. \u201cI wanted to bring that story in,\u201d says Conland, \u201cbecause for her, that psychological point is so dramatic in her own story about her work\u201d. The 1982 slideshow of family photos is projected into a nook between the second and third rooms for the exhibition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI have tried to bring in quite a bit of her and even her voice into the exhibition,\u201d says Conland. She spent years negotiating the loan of the works and building the exhibition, a project that began bubbling around the time that the Art Gallery of New South Wales had a \u201cvery dramatic and almost bombastic\u201d Bourgeois exhibition, of the kind that Conland categorises as being a \u201cblockbuster\u201d. In Private View is decidedly different. It is a contemplative and intimate approach to Bourgeois, not just the high drama. All the works bar one have been loaned anonymously from a private collection \u2013 they\u2019re domestic, or human, in scale, which lends an intimacy to being in the room with them. They\u2019re also more representative of Bourgeois\u2019 practice \u2013 for much of her life, \u201cit was really making in her home and in relation to her family life,\u201d says Conland.<\/p>\n
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (Chair), 1998, steel, glass, on loan from a private collection. \u00a9 The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS\/Copyright Agency, 2025<\/p>\n
The third and final room of In Private View is especially contemplative. The Couple, that shiny aluminium sculpture from 2003, hangs from the ceiling, the two figures almost enmeshed and balancing each other; two big, dark copper eyes look at visitors from the floor; scratched drawings oscillate; and in the pink sculpture Mamelles (1991), breasts, or udders, are jammed into a crevice. This is the end of the show, and one wonders what\u2019s next. For Conland, putting the show together has been \u201ca complete joy\u2026 there\u2019s nothing like working with the art to make you think uniquely, or have thoughts you wouldn\u2019t get just from reading about someone\u2019s work\u201d. Conland spent three years on the show, the last completely engrossed, and you get the sense a relationship has been built between her and the works. On October 16th, you can become completely immersed too. The gallery\u2019s biggest Open Late of the year will be an immersive evening of live music, DJ sets and workshops that explore the surreal world of Louise Bourgeois. And if you can\u2019t get enough of her spirals and spiders, the gallery shop offers a special array of handmade items and books.<\/p>\n
Louise Bourgeois: In Private View is a show you will want to return to. As well as the many works, there\u2019s what is happening between them. The chair that appears, and reappears close by, the spirals that are reimagined in new forms, the imprint of Bourgeois\u2019 hands, then her stitches, the shadows of threads, and the taunt lines of a drawing. I returned a few days later, alone, and found myself cackling at one of the object labels that quotes Bourgeois. Mamelles \u2013 that pink tit landscape, \u201crepresents a man who lives off the women he courts, making his way from one to the next. Feeding from them but returning nothing, he loves only in a consumptive sense.\u201d Here is Bourgeois, as unapologetic, iconic and relevant as ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The landmark artist\u2019s very first solo exhibition in this country presents an intimate view of an extraordinary woman.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2273,307,304,305,306,9111,52903,52904,4723,308,93,61,60,52185],"class_list":["post-81440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-auckland","tag-auckland-art-gallery","tag-auckland-art-gallery-toi-o-tamaki","tag-contemporary-art","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-partners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}