In Conversation: Elisabeth Bronfen and Philip Larratt-Smith

On the day of the talk, Restaurant Beba will be serving a variation on Louise Bourgeois’s recipe for Oxtail Stew, published in FOOD SEX ART: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991).

Together with the exhibition catalogue, a curated selection of publications on Louise Bourgeois is available in the Walther König Bookshop at the Gropius Bau.

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich as well as Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She earned her PhD at the University of Munich with her work on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, as well as her habilitation on representations of femininity and death, Over Her Dead Body. A specialist in 19th and 20th century literature, she has also written articles and books in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture.

Philip Larratt-Smith is a writer and curator and since 2019, Curator of The Easton Foundation in New York, which administers the legacy of Louise Bourgeois. Previous curatorial projects include: Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter (2021), the Jewish Museum, New York and Louise Bourgeois / The Eternal Thread (2018-2019), Long Museum, Shanghai, and Song Art Museum, Beijing. Larratt-Smith has written extensively on postwar and contemporary art, including such artists as Philip Guston, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Jannis Kounellis, and Milton Resnick. He is currently preparing the selected psychoanalytic writings of Louise Bourgeois for publication in 2024.