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
It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.
My work has to do with a defense against fervor. People are always in a rush. To do what? To do nothing! There is a kind of fervor that is completely meaningless. This drawing is a call for meditation.... I am an insomniac, so for me the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach. But I still try to conquer the insomnia, and to a large extent I have done it; it is conquerable. My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking and an attempt at finding peace. Peaceful rhythm. Like rocking a baby to sleep.
I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.
My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.
A work of art doesn't have to be explained,
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I've always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it's not a pin.
The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.
Don't get the green disease of envy. Don't be fooled by success and money. Don't let anything come between you and your work.
In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.
I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...
My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.
An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.
Art is manipulation without intervention.