Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Louise Bourgeois

Structures of Existence: The Cells

13 Oct 2016 - 26 Feb 2017

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Structures of Existence: The Cells
13 October 2016 - 26 February 2017

Passionate, painful, dramatic and extremely personal. The Cells by Louise Bourgeois – higly original spatial scenarios, which she did not start working on until she was almost eighty – take over the Louisiana South Wing.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is one of the most striking and influential artists of the 20th century as well as a central figure in Louisiana’s collection with the Spider Couple. This sculpture is from 2003, the very year when Louisiana first presented the artist retrospectively. Now is the time for a new major exhibition that concentrates specifically on another of the artist’s most original work categories: The Cells.

The term cell plays on all the meanings of the word – from prison cell to monk’s cell to the smallest biological units of the body. Each work is an independent spatial unit filled with carefully arranged objects which in inter­action with cell walls of glass, wire mesh or old doors create sensory, psychologically tense scenarios. As always with Bourgeois, her personal history, pain and passion are the starting point for the works, which at a general level are about the familiar connection between body, architecture, objects and memory.

The exhibition occupies the entire South Wing of Louisiana and features 25 Cells on loan from collections all over the world as well as a selection of smaller sculptures, paintings and drawings. The exhibition is the first of its kind and has been organized by Haus der Kunst in Munich in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk.
 

Tags: Louise Bourgeois