Louise Bourgeois – Femme maison - Women's House (1946-1947)

Exhibition poster with the work, Femme Maison - Women's House (1946-1947), by the French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois, (1911-2011). The poster is published in connection with the exhibition, Fantastic women, at Louisiana in 2020. Bourgeois's works have been exhibited several times at Louisiana and her sculptures and prints are alluring, organic and alive. The works can be regarded as models for survival and insight into life.

Bourgouis is a central figure in modern art history—and in Louisiana's collection. A retrospective exhibition in 2003, Louise Bourgeois - Life as Art, was followed in 2016 by the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells - a display of large, spatial "sculptures" from the artist's later years: open and dissected figures, with a rawness and rigor that was typical of Louise Bourgeois.

Louise Bourgeois has always drawn, and as the very close medium between the body and the image, the drawing is, it has always had a special status in her art, whether it materializes in charcoal, chalk, ink or in various printing techniques.

Louise Bourgeois' work is full of autobiographical material, father disputes, painful experiences from life as a child and as a woman. It revolves around confinement, surveillance and nightmares. Experiences that just won't let go and which are apparently close to the traumatic, like a psychotherapeutic bond alley.

But it is not. Bourgeois's art is borne of a clear awareness of just this. And this means that even though the work originates from something private, it can very well be fully accessible to the viewer—and to Bourgeois herself.


Louise Bourgeois, Femme maison, 1946-47. Oil and ink on linen. Collection Louise Bourgeois Trust. ©The Easton Foundation / VISDA / Photo: Christopher Burke