Louise Bourgeois, Middlesbrough

About

This ARTIST ROOMS exhibition will reveal how Louise Bourgeois, working in a variety of materials and scales, explores the mystery and beauty of human emotions. Her works explore issues around vulnerability and fear and often draw on her own life experience. Despite the deeply personal references to her own life in her work, as well as to a range of art historical movements, Bourgeois’s unique visual language ultimately reaches beyond both, raising universal questions about life and art. In particular, ideas of womanhood and its various guises including the roles of daughter, wife, mother and lover are explored through a vocabulary of recurring motifs: spiders, spirals, the ‘arch of hysteria’, double forms and entwined fabric bodies.

Highlighting her late work, this outstanding collection of works includes 'Poids' (1993), 'Couple I' (1996) - a stuffed fabric work which Bourgeois made from her own blouses, socks and tights, 'Eyes' (2001–5), and 'Cell XIV (Portrait)' (2000), for which Bourgeois uses three heads of fabric sculpture to represent the multiple and contradictory aspects of a single individual. Among the highlights are two late masterpieces, the cycle of 14 monumental drawings 'A L’Infini' (2008–9) and the artist’s final vitrine, 'Untitled' (2010).

mima will be working closely with its award-winning young friends group to offer a fresh and engaging interpretation of Bourgeois. The exhibition follows the successful showing of Bourgeois at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.