Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim
(With a Little Bit of Wax) - Joanne Mattera

Louise Bourgeois, that creative force of nature nearing the century mark, is the subject of a museum-wide retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City through September 12. Her arc spans Surrealism, Modernism, Pop, Feminism, and Installation Art, and her oeuvre-essentially figurative and narrative-includes work in wood, stone, metal, fabric and found objects. Wax, too. She's the original material girl, employing materials that serve her means and message.
I'll have a full report on the exhibition in the Joanne Mattera Art Blog just as the exhibition comes to a close, but in the meantime I thought you might like to see this piece, Red Room (Child), one of the many autobiographical  "cells," or enclosed installations Bourgeois made in the Nineties. The mood of these cells is dreamlike and surreal, with fact and metaphor interwoven in ways that are clear, perhaps, only to the artist.  The two pairs of hands on the pedestal in the center of the image are carved from red wax (presumably casting wax), as are what appear to be viscera at the right of the frame.
Louise Bourgeois
Red Room (Child), 1994
Mixed media
83 x 139 x 108"; 210.8 x 353 x 274.3 cm.
Collection Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal
Photo: Marcus Schneider, courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum
© Louise Bourgeois
It helps to know that Bourgeois's parents ran a tapestry restoration business in Choisy, France, early in the 20th century. Hands and fingers are, of course, intimately involved with the manipulation of warp and weft. But Bourgeois's parents had a difficult marriage (pere was sleeping with the live-in nanny), and little Louise felt betrayed. So hands suggest not just work but a tender touch and its absence. Red is blood, life, heart, love, heartbreak. Those cones and spools of thread simply reinforce that tangled emotional web. Perhaps this is why the spider appears with some frequency in her work as well.
'Louise Bourgeois' will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, from October 26 through January 25, 2009. It will then travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, where it will remain from February 26 through May 17, 2009.  -JM