The landmark artist’s very first solo exhibition in this country presents an intimate view of an extraordinary woman.
For the very first time, there’s a Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Aotearoa. It’s a close look into the long life and career of an iconic, larger-than-life figure of contemporary art.
First, a spiral. It’s sketchy, purple and huge on the fleshy pink wall. Overlaid onto it in vinyl lettering is “Louise Bourgeois: In Private View”. 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 – or entrapped – by the spiky legs of one of her supersized spider sculptures. Beyond is the very first solo exhibition of the artist’s work to be shown in Aotearoa. It’s 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.
Louise Bourgeois with her sculpture on the roof of her apartment building, New York, circa 1944. Photo: © The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025
It is hard to describe Louise Bourgeois’ 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 “in-library use only”. Some of my friends and I would simply refer to her as “LB”, mimicking the neatly stitched letters she marked her works with. Bourgeois is among the most notable artists of the 20th century, but can’t be defined by a movement, although she came into contact with many – surrealism, abstract expressionism, modernism, eccentric abstraction, postmodernism and the feminist art movement. “She would duck and cover from almost every grouping that she was associated with,” says Natasha Conland, senior curator of global contemporary art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. We’ve met to look at the works and discuss the woman behind them on the eve of the exhibition’s opening. “She could have at almost any point joined a movement and become its star – but she didn’t. She sets herself apart, and she really uses her voice to find herself”.
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’s 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’re 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 – downstairs were three sons, and all the work that comes with mothering.
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2004, fabric, wool, steel, on loan from a private collection. © The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025
The death of Bourgeois’ 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’s a spider – but here the spider sits as a small part of Bourgeois’ 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. “A spiral represents somewhere that you might get stuck, but it can also be a safe place,” says Conland, “it’s somewhere you can retreat to, but it also makes you vulnerable”. 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’s mistress.
Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2003, aluminum, on loan from a private collection. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025
Bourgeois was tight-lipped about her personal life until she was 71 – 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’ gravelly voice rings out, telling the story which is understood as an origin story for her art. “I wanted to bring that story in,” says Conland, “because for her, that psychological point is so dramatic in her own story about her work”. The 1982 slideshow of family photos is projected into a nook between the second and third rooms for the exhibition.
“I have tried to bring in quite a bit of her and even her voice into the exhibition,” 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 “very dramatic and almost bombastic” Bourgeois exhibition, of the kind that Conland categorises as being a “blockbuster”. 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 – they’re domestic, or human, in scale, which lends an intimacy to being in the room with them. They’re also more representative of Bourgeois’ practice – for much of her life, “it was really making in her home and in relation to her family life,” says Conland.
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (Chair), 1998, steel, glass, on loan from a private collection. © The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025
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’s next. For Conland, putting the show together has been “a complete joy… there’s nothing like working with the art to make you think uniquely, or have thoughts you wouldn’t get just from reading about someone’s work”. 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’s 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’t get enough of her spirals and spiders, the gallery shop offers a special array of handmade items and books.
Louise Bourgeois: In Private View is a show you will want to return to. As well as the many works, there’s 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’ 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 – that pink tit landscape, “represents 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.” Here is Bourgeois, as unapologetic, iconic and relevant as ever.