Exhibition Texts
Exhibition
Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1997 . Installation view, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, 2022 © Gropius Bau, photo: Luca Girardini
The Woven Child was the first major survey to focus exclusively on Louise Bourgeois’s fabric-based works. The exhibition charted the artists’s lifelong connection to textiles, and the memories they conjure, through a diverse body of sculptures, installations, drawings, collages, books and prints.
Bourgeois’s fabric works, that she only began working on in her eighties, are among her most compelling and intimate creations. The late decision to create artworks from her clothes and household textiles was a means of transforming as well as preserving the past. Bourgeois incorporated these objects, which held memories associated with specific places and people, into sculptural installations that were on display at the Gropius Bau, such as her Cells and free-standing “pole pieces”. The exhibition shed a new light on Bourgeois by linking her fabric works to her material processes, her own biography, and themes of the body, memory, femininity, trauma and repair.
Curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery, and Julienne Lorz, former Chief Curator, Gropius Bau
Acatalogue provides a comprehensive overview of the fabric works from the last two decades in the career of legendary artist Louise Bourgeois. With texts by Lynne Cooke, Rachel Cusk, Julienne Lorz und Ralph Rugoff.
Partners: Alexa, Dussmann, Wall, YorckKinogruppe
Media partners: Arte, Kulturradio, MaisonMadame, Monopol, Tagesspiegel
The exhibition was funded by