Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child
22 July to 23 October 2022
The Woven Child is the first major survey to focus exclusively on Louise Bourgeois’s fabric-based works. The exhibition charts the artists’s lifelong connection to textiles, and the memories they conjure, through a diverse body of sculptures, installations, drawings, collages, books and prints.
Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1997. Installation view, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, 2022
© Gropius Bau, photo: Luca Girardini
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 are on display at the Gropius Bau, such as her Cells and free-standing “pole pieces”. The exhibition sheds 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
A catalogue 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.
Video tour through the exhibition with Curator Julienne Lorz
