Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth25 December 1911
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
... geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It's not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I'm able to avoid or manipulate or process pain.
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.
My knives are like a tongue - I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don’t love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife.
Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.
Art is a way of recognizing oneself...
Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.
Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.
My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.
Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.
My life has been regulated by insomnia.
You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.
My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed. They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.
I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.