This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition in MoMA’s history, and the accompanying landmark publication, which established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation—one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture, and the construction of a Modernist history of photography. As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his essay for the book, “After looking at these pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, compare this vision of a continent as it is, not as it might be or as it was, with any other coherent vision that we have had since the war. What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans’s work has, in addition, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection.”

Comprising approximately 60 prints from the Museum’s collection that were included in the 1938 exhibition or the accompanying publication, the current installation maintains the bipartite presentation of the originals; the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social environments, while the second consists of photographs of the relics that constitute expressions of an American cultural identity—the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. Its placement on the fourth floor of the Museum—between galleries featuring the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol—underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture, and the vernacular. Their profound impact on not only photography, but also film, literature, and the visual arts, reverberates today.

Organized by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Research and Collections, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography

Marc Newson: At Home will feature limited editions by one of the most acclaimed and influential designers of his generation. Marc Newson approaches design as an exercise in which he tests extreme structure and advanced technologies, combining an innovative use of materials and production processes. His broad reach extends from transportation (concept cars and jets), to furniture, to clothing and jewelry, to kitchen and bath fittings. Focusing for the first time on Newson’s residential work, the exhibition will be furnished entirely with the artist’s designs. Among the objects featured in the living-room area will be Newson’s widely recognized aluminum-clad Lockheed Lounge.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Collab, a group of Philadelphia-based design professionals who support the Museum’s modern and contemporary design collection, will honor Newson with the 2013 Design Excellence Award on November 22. The Museum will also hold its annual Collab Student Design Competition in which architectural and industrial design students from local colleges and universities will present their own Marc Newson–inspired designs. For the first time since the competition began, the best designs will go on display for one week on the East Balcony of the Great Stair Hall. Also new this year will be a People’s Choice Award where visitors will be able to vote for their favorite student design.

This exhibition is made possible by Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer. Additional support is provided by Collab—a group that supports the Museum’s modern and contemporary design collection and programs. In-kind support is provided courtesy of Alessi, Dom Pérignon, Flos, Gagosian, GWA, Herman Miller, KDDI, Pentax Ricoh, Smeg, and Qantas Airways. The Philadelphia Museum of Art gratefully acknowledges Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust and the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation for support of the Collab Student Design Competition.

Aquatopia is a major exhibition of contemporary and historic art that explores how the ocean deep has been imagined across cultures and through time. The exhibition and the accompanying book reveal how human societies have projected their sexual desires, their will to power, and their fear of difference and mortality onto the often mysterious and weird life-forms the ocean sustains. The ocean deep, in this exhibition, is a dream-state, akin to the unconscious. At the same time, its mythologies represent far-reaching historical processes.

Aquatopia’s briny depths are populated with ancient sea monsters and futuristic dolphin embassies, sirens and paramilitary gill-men, sperm whales and water babies, shipwrecks and submersibles, giant squid and lecherous octopuses. The ocean’s fantastical species will be represented by iconic paintings, drawings and sculptures by JMW Turner, Marcel Broodthaers, Oskar Kokoshka, Barbara Hepworth, Odilon Redon, Lucian Freud and Hokusai, amongst others. It also includes video, performance, sculpture and painting by more recent significant figures in contemporary art such as Mark Dion, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Sean Landers, The Otolith Group, Simon Starling and Wangechi Mutu.

At Tate St Ives, the exhibition travels to the very edge of the ocean, occupying all of the gallery’s spectacular spaces, overlooking Porthmeor beach. Presented in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, the exhibition at Tate St Ives has been curated by Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary, with Martin Clark, Tate St Ives’s former Artistic Director and Director of Bergen Kunsthalle. Featuring over two hundred artworks, as well as various aquatic artefacts and curios, the exhibition has been supported by loans from museums and private collectors, including Victoria & Albert Museum, National Maritime Museum and Tate’s own collection.

The art in Aquatopia has strong links with powerful literary archetypes, includingThe Odyssey, The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The richly illustrated catalogue, published by Nottingham Contemporary and Tate St Ives, in association with Tate Publishing, will include newly commissioned and recent critical essays by leading thinkers and writers on the sea from various disciplines, including Philip Hoare, Marcus Rediker, Marina Warner, Kodwo Eshun, Simon Grant, David Toop and Celeste Olalquiaga, as well as numerous literary works.

Although Lilli Carré (American, b. 1983) is perhaps best known for her award-winning comics, animated films, and commercial illustration, her interdisciplinary creative practice employs a wide range of media including printmaking, artists’ books, painting, and, most recently, sculpture. Carré’s work, which defies simple classification by medium, encompasses delicate and moving explorations of humor and failure, narrative and time, the human form and abstraction, and presence and mortality.

For her BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works exhibition—the artist’s first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—Carré presents an entirely new body of work in animation, sculpture, and drawing, highlighting new directions in her creative process. Sculptures are displayed in pairs to show the objects in two separate states of being, while their dimensional forms are abstracted, flattened, and reflected in accompanying drawings. A new work, made specifically for this installation, consists of two videos projected on opposite walls. The dual projection reveals slowly shifting temporal relationships between images, which alternate between abstraction and figuration, and positions the viewer in the empty space between the two animations. The artist encourages viewers to interpret this space and play an active role in filling the gap between objects and their resonant images.

Carré’s work has been exhibited both locally and internationally at galleries and museums, film festivals, and alternative comics festivals. She cofounded the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, and is a key figure in Chicago’s vibrant arts community. The BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works exhibition series showcases the best new work being made in Chicago, by artists whether emerging or established, at midcareer or undergoing reinvention. This exhibition is organized by Michelle Puetz, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at MCA Chicago.

Australia is the most significant survey of Australian art ever mounted in the UK. Focusing on the influence of the landscape, Australia spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and features 146 artists with over 200 works, including paintings, drawings, photography, watercolours and multimedia. This ambitious exhibition brings together works from the most important public collections in Australia, the majority of which have never been seen in the UK before.

HRH The Prince of Wales, who is the Patron of the exhibition, said:

The story of Australian art is inextricably linked to its landscape: an ancient land of dramatic beauty, a source of production, enjoyment, relaxation and inspiration, yet seemingly loaded with mystery and danger. For Australian artists, this deep connection with the landscape has provided a rich seam of inspiration for centuries. In 1948, the Australian artist, and Royal Academician, Sidney Nolan (1917-92) said of his iconic Ned Kelly series that it was ‘a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush’. He believed strongly that an understanding of landscape was central to his work, giving meaning to place, and commented that he found ‘the desire to paint the landscape involves a wish to hear more of the stories that take place in the landscape’.

The exhibition maps the period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of the first settlers and colonisation on the indigenous people to the pioneering nation-building of the nineteenth century, through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last century. Reflecting the vastness of the land and the diversity of its people, early, as well as contemporary Aboriginal art sits alongside the work of the first colonial settlers, immigrant artists of the twentieth century and the work of some of today’s most established Australian artists.

The exhibition includes works by Aboriginal artists such as Albert Namatjira (1902-59), Rover Thomas (c.1926-98), Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-96) and a number of artists from the Papunya Tula group of the Western Desert. Nineteenth century European immigrants such as John Glover (1767-1849) and Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901) also feature, as well as the Australian Impressionists whose paintings relied heavily on the mythology of the Australian bush: Arthur Streeton (1867-1943), Tom Roberts (1856-1931), a student of the Royal Academy Schools, Charles Conder (1868-1909) and Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917). Early Modernists such as Margaret Preston (1875-1963), Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) and Roy de Maistre (1894-1968) hang alongside the leading twentieth-century painters: Arthur Boyd (1920-99), Albert Tucker (1914-99), Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-99), Fred Williams (1927-82), Brett Whiteley (1939-92) and Sidney Nolan RA. The exhibition ends in the twenty-first century with internationally recognised artists such as Bill Henson (b.1955), Gordon Bennett (b.1955), Tracey Moffatt (b.1960), Fiona Hall (b.1953) Shaun Gladwell (b.1972), Christian Thompson (b.1978) and Simryn Gill (b.1959) who represented Australia at the Venice Biennale this year.

Highlights include Frederick McCubbin’s The Pioneer, 1904 (National Gallery of Victoria); four paintings from Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, 1946 (National Gallery of Australia); Rover Thomas’ Cyclone Tracy, 1991 (National Gallery of Australia); Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Big Yam Dreaming, 1995 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Shaun Gladwell’s video Approach to Mundi Mundi, 2007 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, John Kaldor Family Collection). Judy Watson has been commissioned to create Fire and Water, a new sculpture for the Royal Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard.

Australia aims to evoke a sense of the distinctiveness of the Australian landscape whilst considering the art historical developments and contributions of Australian art across the last two centuries. It shows how in the nineteenth century an exploration of national identity allowed artists a freedom to define themselves, away from the rules of the European tradition. That focus on the landscape and its complex, deep-rooted connections to national identity, has continued in the work of Australian artists to the present day.

Christopher Le Brun, President of the Royal Academy of Arts, said:

Dr Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia said:

Organisation

Exhibition organised with the National Gallery of Australia. The exhibition has been curated by Kathleen Soriano, Director of Exhibitions, Royal Academy of Arts, Dr Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Dr Anna Gray, Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is an immersive film installation projected onto nine double-sided screens arranged in a dynamic structure. Especially conceived for The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, the installation choreographs visitors’ movement through the space. The original inspiration for the recently acquired, 50-minute moving image installation was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England.

Julien poetically interweaves contemporary Chinese culture with its ancient myths—including the fable of the goddess Mazu (played by Maggie Cheung), which comes from the Fujian Province, from where the Morecambe Bay workers originated. In one section, the Tale of Yishan Island, Julien recounts the story of 16th-century fishermen lost and imperiled at sea. Central to the legend is the sea goddess figure who leads the fishermen to safety. In a preceding section, shot at the Shanghai Film Studios, actress Zhao Tao takes part in a re-enactment of the classic 1930s Chinese film The Goddess. Additional collaborators include calligrapher Gong Fagen, the film and video artist Yang Fudong, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi and poet Wang Ping from whom Julien commissioned “Small Boats”, a poem that is recited in Ten Thousand Waves.

The installation is staged on the streets of both modern and old Shanghai, and includes music and sounds that fuse Eastern and Western traditions. The installation’s sound structure is as immersive as its sequenced images, with contributions from, among others, London-based musician Jah Wobble and the Chinese Dub Orchestra, and an original score by Spanish contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.

London-based Julien is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. After graduating from St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1984, he came to prominence with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston, a poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. Informed by his film background, Julien’s gallery installations form fractured narratives that reflect a critical thinking about race, globalization, and representation. In 2008 MoMA coproduced Julien’s film Derek (2008), a filmic biography of the late British filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Isaac Julien. Mazu,Turning (Ten Thousand Waves). 2010.
Endura Ultra photograph. 80 x 60.3 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Ten Thousand Waves was conceived and created over four years. In a reflection of the movement of people across continents, audiences move freely around the Marron Atrium with the ability to watch from whatever vantage points they choose.

Organized by Sabine Breitwieser, former Chief Curator (until January 31, 2013), with Martin Hartung, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by Leila and Mickey Straus.

Additional funding is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, and the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.

Video projectors are provided by Christie® with additional support from Michael Andrews.

Richard Serra is one of the most important and revered artists working today.  Rising to prominence on the New York art scene more than forty years ago, Serra (born 1938) is now celebrated internationally, notably for his unprecedented monumental steel sculptures and for his radical approach to drawing.  Richard Serra: Drawings for The Courtauld is the first time a museum has presented Serra’s most recent drawings, which mark a new departure for the artist.  The display will unveil twelve of Serra’s drawings created especially for this installation at The Courtauld Gallery.  Made using compressed black lithographic rubbing ink applied to both sides of a clear plastic sheet, these works, which he calls ‘Transparencies’, are extraordinary in that they challenge preconceptions of what constitutes a drawing.

Courtauld Transparency #10, 2013
Litho crayon on Mylar, 76.2 x 61 cm
© Richard Serra

For Serra, drawing has always been an essential way of exploring new creative impulses, materials and working methods.  His ambition has always been to make discoveries through the process of drawing itself, rather than to execute preconceived ideas.  To this end, about two years ago, Serra developed the innovative technique by which his Drawings for The Courtauld are made.  The process brings in elements of his print-making practice to offer Serra a new way of drawing.  He sandwiches a clean sheet of transparent plastic, called Mylar, between two other Mylar sheets both of which have been prepared on one side with a thick covering of black litho crayon – rather like placing a slice of ham between two buttered pieces of bread.  Working with a stylus on the upper surface of the top sheet, the pressure of his movements transfers the litho crayon from the prepared, outer sheets to both the front and back of the clear middle piece.  Peeling the sandwich apart, the central sheet becomes the work of art.  The resultant work is framed although, in all other respects, it is quite unlike a traditional drawing.  The forms that emerge are spiralling, circular or rectangular and only just seem to cohere, as if still in the process of creation.  They convey a heightened sense of weight, mass and balance that is inseparable from their material substance.  The litho crayon appears as an encrusted black mass on the side that faces the viewer, but it adheres unevenly and the smooth underside of the material on the reverse of the sheet can also be partly seen.  This all conspires to create great visual complexity and uncertainty, confronting basic assumptions about drawing.  Our perceptions of front and back, surface and depth and, most importantly, the distinction between the drawing and the material from which it is made, are all challenged by these works.

Serra has long admired The Courtauld Gallery’s collection and it is particularly fitting that these radical new works should be shown for the first time at a museum with such a renowned and rich historical collection of drawings and prints.  However, it is one of The Courtauld’s great paintings, Cézanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1894, which has been a major touchstone for Serra throughout his career.  The way Cézanne pushed the boundaries of perspective and space in the painting threw down a challenge for the young Serra that continues to drive him.  ‘I looked at that painting and the hair on the back of my neck stood up’, Serra recalled recently, ‘you realise that someone has extended their vision in such a way that if you are going to make any contribution at all, you have to break new ground’.  Serra’s drawings for The Courtauld are the latest expression of this life-long pursuit.

Supported by Pilar Ordovas, and others who wish to remain anonymous, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Richard Serra and Barnaby Wright, Daniel Katz Curator of 20^th Century Art, The Courtauld Gallery.

Unstable Territory. Borders and identity in contemporary art, curated by Walter Guadagnini and Franziska Nori, showcases work by international artists which will encourage visitors to reconsider the notion of territory in a contemporary world.  Whilst the latter is increasingly characterised by the obsolescence of such concepts as the nation state and borders, there is, at the same time, a return to new forms of nationalism and renewed interest in the individual in relation to a specific area or community.

The astonishing development of mobility for both people and goods, the digitisation of communication and knowledge, migration and an increasingly global economy have all radically changed people’s perception of territories, borders and boundaries.  In view of the instability of these concepts crucial to the definition of personal identity, two different –though not necessarily conflicting – trends appear to be taking shape: one based on seeking shelter in the safety and proximity of the micro-territory, the region or even the family; the other, as theorised by sociologist Ulrich Beck, involving a new conception of cosmopolitanism in its most democratic and egalitarian sense.

What does it mean when we talk about “territory” today?  The term does not simply refer to a geographical or spatial area, it also refers to a concept of social and cultural belonging and extends into the personal, psychological and mental sphere.  The works in this exhibition reflect different approaches, lifestyles and ways of perceiving the unstable relationship between identity, territory and borders in an age of great expectations (and illusions) regarding a borderless society, a shared global territory.  Photographs, videos and installations spark reflections on the notion of the border as discovery or barrier, on the hybridisation between cosmopolitism and territorial claims, on the figure of the artist himself as traveller, nomad or experimenter teetering on the edge of physical and symbolic territories.

Artists Paulo Nazareth (Brazil, 1977) and Sigalit Landau (Israel, 1969) focus their research on their own body and its relationship with territories, borders and boundaries.  The heterogeneous work of Nazareth, a man who has explored many corners of the world at great length and on foot, from Brazil to the United States and as far afield as India, discloses a reflection on his figure as a nomadic artist playing with, and discovering, his multi-ethnic identity through performances, linguistic misunderstandings and ironic encounters with different people and places.  Sigalit Landau, on the other hand, has submitted two performances, entitled DeadSee and Barbed Hula, reflecting on the theme of the physical and symbolic boundary and on the juxtaposition between life and death, the achievement and loss of identity. The first performance focuses on the creation of an intriguing spiral comprising her own body and a seemingly endless number of watermelons floating on the Dead Sea, while the second shows her naked body spinning a hula hoop made of barbed wire on a beach in Tel Aviv.

Marked by his own life story played out between Algeria and the Paris suburbs, Kader Attia (France, 1970) explores the contradictions and complexities in the relationship between global East and West, North and South, in a search through installations and works of art that invite reflection on the notion of the re-appropriation of culture and identity.  For this exhibition Attia presents a new installation which will engage visitors in tight paths made of fragments of mirrors, sparking reflection on the relationship between external space and identity, physical and psychological territories.

Tadashi Kawamata (Japan, 1953) has produced a site-specific installation deployed in several different areas of Palazzo Strozzi, intensifying his characteristic reflection on the confrontation/interpenetration of different places and different styles of architecture.  Resembling birds’ nests but also small, haphazard homes, a number of temporary wooden constructions (so-called Tree Huts) form an “illegal” graft on the Palazzo’s solid and powerful Renaissance structure, creating a strong contrast between transitory materials and permanent structures, between historical architecture and a temporary installation.

Addressing a highly topical theme for Italy, the exhibition presents a video entitled The Right of Passage by Oliver Ressler (Austria, 1970) and Zanny Begg (Australia, 1972) which tackles the issue of citizenship rights and national identity, dwelling on the main legal tool for travel and sojourn: the passport.  Interviews with people from all walks of life and with migration experts are interspersed with animated sequences prompting a reflection on the difficulty, or indeed the impossibility, of winning the basic political rights that determine each individual’s life in a society.

Exposing the inconsistencies of a financial globalisation process based on transcending (or circumventing) the concept of nationhood at the legal and economic levels, Paolo Cirio (Italy, 1979) presents a project entitled Loophole for All merging digital hacking with artistic action.  Playing on the tax “loopholes” legally recognised by Cayman Islands legislation, Cirio has created an online platform selling, for only 99 cents, certificates attesting a stake in real companies registered in this notorious tax haven.  His aim is to make tax evasion legal and possible for all, not only for famous hedge funds and multinational corporations.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (South Africa, 1970; United Kingdom, 1971) present a new stage in their Chicago project, a video and photographic installation of a non-place, a territory both real and unreal: the ersatz Arab township of Chicago built by the Israeli Army in the Negev Desert in Palestine so that it can conduct simulations and exercises involving military action and control of the Arab population.

The works submitted by The Cool Couple (Niccolò Benetton and Simone Santilli, Italy, 1986 and 1987) and Jo Ractliffe (South Africa, 1961) also lie in the furrow of a reflection on the status of photography as a record of contradictory territories.  The Italian team presents a new production focusing on a border area, the Carnia region in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and on a historical event known to few and forgotten by most, namely the enforced presence of the Cossack community in the area in 1944–5.  Modern photographs of landscape and archive material trigger a short-circuit in a reflection on the overlap in traditions, languages and customs, and on the traces and the censorship of this cultural contamination.  In a series of photographs in black and white entitled As Terras do Fim do Mundo, Ractliffe, on the other hand, proposes a silent and poetic survey of the places that were the theatre of the bloody civil war in Angola, during which national rifts merged with the supranational rationale of the Cold War, leading to a clash between the South African Army and Revolutionary Armed Forces troops despatched from Cuba.

Another reflection on the role of the image in relation to a territory marked by war is offered by Richard Mosse (Ireland, 1980) with his six-channel video-installation entitled The Enclave, the result of a long working trip to the eastern Congo and recently presented at the Irish Pavilion in the Venice Biennale.  In a very striking atmosphere, Mosse allows the visitor to explore landscapes of an extraordinary and almost alienating beauty, yet heavily marked by the twenty-year civil war in which over five million people lost their lives.  Thanks to a special kind of infrared film developed for military purposes in the 1940s, the green of forests and meadows turns bright red.  Troops and destruction become alienating fluorescent elements that combine with a strong sound component to involve the observer in a powerful emotional experience.

The exhibition catalogue (Italian/English) is published by Mandragora and features critical essays by the curators Walter Guadagnini (independent curator) and Franziska Nori (CCCS Director) together with texts by Ulrich Beck (MunichUniversity and London School of Economics) and Francesco Careri (Università di Roma).

Unstable Territory is on view concurrently with The Russian Avant-garde, Siberia and the East at Palazzo Strozzi, 27 September 2013 to 19 January 2014.  Curated by John Bowlt, Nicoletta Misler, Evgenia Petrova, it represents the first international exhibition to examine the fundamental importance of the Oriental and Eurasian connection to Russian Modernism, and follows the destinies of Russia’s self-proclaimed “Barbarians” in their search for new sources of artistic inspiration.

The National Galleries of Scotland is proud to announce a major presentation of works by the great American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in an exhibition entitled Louise Bourgeois: A Woman without Secrets at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 26 October to 18 May 2014.

Highlighting her late work, the exhibition is a first showing of an outstanding collection of works by Louise Bourgeois now on loan to the national ARTIST ROOMS programme, including ‘Poids’ 1993, ‘Couple I’ 1996, ‘Cell XIV (Portrait)’ 2000, ‘Eyes’2001-2005, and two late masterpieces, the cycle of 14 monumental drawings ‘A L’Infini’ 2008-2009 and the artist’s final vitrine, ‘Untitled’ 2010. These works will be augmented by important loans from Tate, the Easton Foundation and the Louise Bourgeois Trust in New York. This exhibition will reveal how Bourgeois, working in a variety of materials and scales, explores the mystery and beauty of human emotions.

Bourgeois, Louise
Sainte Sébastienne, 2006
Tapisserie des Gobelins
340 x 250 cm
Mobilier national
© Mobilier national / Isabelle Bideau

ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate and was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS On Tour is a partnership with Arts Council England, the Art Fund, and in Scotland, Creative Scotland, making available the ARTIST ROOMS collection to galleries and museums throughout the UK. Intended to inspire audiences, particularly young people, there have been more than 110 ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions, seen by some 25 million visitors since the touring programme was launched in 2009.

Louise Bourgeois: A Woman without Secrets has been organised in collaboration with Jerry Gorovoy of the Louise Bourgeois Studio and The Easton Foundation, which has very generously lent a number of major sculptural works including Spiral Woman, 1984 and a giant Spider from 1994. The exhibition is further augmented through the loan of several key works from Tate’s collection, including Avenza, 1968-9, Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989-93 and a group of late works in red gouache, dating from 2007-9.

Complementing the exhibition, The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh will be presenting a majorexhibition of Bourgeois’s works on paper.  Louise Bourgeois I Give Everything Away, curated by Frances Morris (Tate Modern) features the artist’s Insomnia Drawings, a remarkable suite of 220 drawings and writings on loan from the Daros Collection, alongside a selection of works from the Louise Bourgeois Trust.  This exhibition also opens on 26 October, and runs until 23 February 2014.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was born in France and studied with Fernand Léger in Paris during the 1930s. She moved to New York in 1937, following her marriage to Robert Goldwater, an authority on African art and Director of the Museum of Primitive Art, who died in 1973.  Bourgeois’ earliest works were often seen in the context of Surrealism.  It was not until the last quarter of her career, when she entered an extraordinarily fertile period of creativity – in part due to her researches into psychoanalysis – that her achievements became recognised.

Bourgeois’ work expresses strongly autobiographical concerns, and many of her sculptures and drawings explore recollections from her childhood or reflect on her complex relationships with her parents. The family business of tapestry restoration also provided a primary source for her work. Her connection to this French tradition can be found in the materials she chose to use, her focus on the activity of sewing and mending and is found spatially in her construction of rooms, cells and hanging forms. She often indicated that she felt a prisoner to her memories and aimed to exorcise them, once saying, ‘I am a woman without secrets. Anything private should not be a risk, it should be a result, which should be understood, resolved, packaged and disposed of’. Her confrontation of such burdens through psychoanalysis became a fundamental part of her work and is echoed in the titles of the two exhibitions opening in Edinburgh.

Despite the deeply personal references to her own life in her work, as well as to a range of art historical movements, Bourgeois’ unique visual language ultimately reaches beyond both, raising universal questions about life and art. In particular, ideas of womanhood and its various guises including the roles of daughter, wife, mother and lover are explored through a vocabulary of recurring motifs: spiders, spirals, the ‘arch of hysteria’, double forms and entwined fabric bodies. The materials Bourgeois chose to use, including traditional bronze and marble, as well as fabrics, rubber and found objects, were an essential part of her practice, often employed radically to highlight the interplay between opposites such as male and female, father and mother, soft and hard, exterior and interior, fear and calm, and vulnerability and strength.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, made possible with support from Hauser & Wirth and The Easton Foundation.