Muristek
Severed heads, fraying stitches and exposed bodily orifices feature in a new exhibition of the artist’s late works in fabric
On a loose sheet of paper from 1995, when she was in her 80s, Louise Bourgeois wrote: “The beautiful clothes from your youth – so what – sacrifice / them, eaten by the moths.” The statement represented a turning point in the French-American artist’s life and work. Schooled in the importance of self-presentation since childhood, Bourgeois observed that the “beautiful clothes” of her youth were, by this stage, amassing dust in her Manhattan townhouse. But to sacrifice them didn’t mean to dispose of them. She took up the needle and began to repurpose her clothing in a new sequence of fabric works – textile figures, collages, tactile drawings, books, prints.
Bourgeois is known for her “spider” sculptures: towering arachnids carved in foreboding bronze and stainless steel. But the spider, as she frequently reminded her spectators, is also a deft weaver and repairer – and working with fabric was always part of her life. Born in Paris in 1911, she grew up mending vintage tapestries as the daughter of a seamstress. After a stint selling books in the family’s Paris showroom, she met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian. Wanting to escape France, she married him and relocated in 1938 to New York City, where she would remain and build an astonishing career until her death in 2010.
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