Spider Woman

© the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Cheim and Read and Galerie Karsten Greve

Louise Bourgeois, "Seven in Bed" (2001)

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Just four years shy of her centenary, Louise Bourgeois will shortly be the subject of a major survey at Tate Modern. Concurrent with the Tate retrospective will be a show of new work at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, which will debut bronze casts, vitrine pieces, and stacked fabric progressions. Few living artists have proved so prolific, so influential, and so unflinchingly honest as the French-born, New York–based artist, whose work has been alternately associated with modernism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism but is mostly viewed as unmistakably her own. Born in Paris in 1911, she studied art at the École du Louvre, among other places, until her move in 1938 to New York. Since abandoning painting in the ’40s, her sculptural and installation work—in wood, bronze, glass, metal, rubber, and stone—has explored domestic themes and an early, almost feral sexuality. Although imbued with the mystery of her origins, these works are anything but stuck in the past. As Bourgeois has said: “This is not mere ‘parole antique.’ I work with the present. Eternal, universal, and ever-present emotions. Especially the emotions of violence, jealousy, and fear.”

Louise Bourgeois, Oct. 10–Jan. 20, 2008, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk/modern

“New Works,” Oct. 10–Nov. 17, Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, London, hauserwirth.com

"Spider Woman" comes to ARTINFO from the October 2007 issue of Modern Painters magazine.