looking back at Louise Bourgeois

I came to the work of Louise Bourgeois at a relatively late period in my life. Half drunk at a Chelsea art school 'showing' I attempted to socialise with the imposing group of my then girlfriends classmates, pretending to be interested in female sculptors. I desperately grasped a Louise Bourgeois book to my chest and started to thrust through the pages. Instead of being immensely bored with it all i found myself becoming more and more engaged with the art which confronted me. I liked the imposition of the self that Louise Bourgeois managed to place in otherwise abstract images and how the art could be so explicit, grotesque and yet come across as playful. The sculptures of Louise Bourgeois are meticulously constructed and can yet still appear to be falling apart when seen. Of course there is something so compelling about a woman who is easy at putting it all on the line, even in a world that she sees hung with pain and insecurity.

So I promptly dragged my friends to the Tate Modern's retrospective the very next week and I was astonished to discover that Louise Bourgeois wasn't actually critically acclaimed until part way into her seventies. Only an exhibition at the Museum of Modern art really brought a public focus on her work. Maybe it was the overt sexual subject of the artwork which was feared and discouraged by a paternal art world for so long. This only seemed to verify my original feelings that it was pain and neglect inflicted by the outside world which underscored Bourgeois' work; I can't begin to imagine what it is that drives one when everyone around seems abject and disinterested. After hearing of the tragic news of Louise Bourgeois' death I have been reading through interviews and articles. It is one statement that I found which has been enlightening when pondering on how Bourgeois could stick it. When talking of the relationship between her original degree in geometry and maths and her career in art, Bourgeois said “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” Hiding through the formations and strands of shape which twist themselves vertically to the sky seems something of critical importance. It's what I originally saw in the synthetic sculptures, her body becoming entwined with the art and its in what I now see, the process of art that hides us from the alienation and pain of modern life.