ARTIST ROOMS is a world-class collection of international contemporary art dedicated to fostering creativity amongst young people nationwide.
People have used language as an expressive art form for millennia, from oral tradition and the spoken word, to illuminated manuscripts and printed publications. This room brings together works produced in the last 50 years in Europe and the USA. They demonstrate different ways of engaging with text and its role as a form of communication.
With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences. Using drawings, prints, sculpture and fabric works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, this exhibition takes an in-depth look at Bourgeois's work through the themes and ideas of an extraordinary artist.
Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017) was born in the Greek port city of Piraeus, but lived and worked in Rome from 1956. His early paintings were inspired by words and graphics found in street signs, which he gradually reduced to letters, numbers and basic symbols arranged over plain backgrounds. Though he soon expanded his practice to include performance and sculpture, he considered himself primarily a painter. Whether making pictures or using materials and objects that share the same space as us as viewers, he aimed to create powerful images, mundane and strange at the same time.
