Louise Bourgeois

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Louise Bourgeois at the printing press in the lower level of her home and studio on 20th Street

New York, 1995. (photo by Mathias Johansson ©)

A stunning exhibition by Louise Bourgeois at the Esker Foundation in Calgary shines a light on her lesser-known print, textile and holographic works, while exploring their role in her artistic development. Bourgeois, a French-American artist, is mostly known for monumental spiders and evocative figurative sculptures, but she was also a dedicated printmaker, relying on surreal etchings and engravings to sustain her early sculptural practice.

Celebrated for her idiosyncratic style, she was a pioneering and iconic figure. Over many decades, even prior to her death in 2010 at the age of 98, she put her psyche under intense scrutiny, transforming her thoughts and emotions into works of startling formal complexity.

The exhibition, What is the Shape of This Problem, was postponed and interrupted by the pandemic, but is on view now until June 27 without booking an appointment. It presents several series of print and textile works from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, head of a real estate investment company in Portland, Oregon. 

Included is a 2004 editioned version of a fabric book, Ode à l’Oubli, created two years earlier from Bourgeois’ own garments, along with prints from her final two decades. Bourgeois’ prolific and lifelong drawing and writing practice fed into her ongoing interest in illustrated books and printmaking, eventually leading to the hybrid works on view at the Esker. 

In Ode à l’Oubli, printmaking merges seamlessly with textiles. It’s the perfect entry into the show with its range of techniques – from appliqué and quilting to embroidery and weaving – and it echoes many forms from her earlier career, including totemic stacked towers, tightly woven grids and round organic shapes, as well as concentric circles and squares. 

This intimate yet rigorously constructed book, here deconstructed and framed, pushes the boundaries of editioning to reproduce the original fabric with accurate vintage textiles, as well as state-of-the-art lithography and meticulous dye processes. 

Early in her career, Bourgeois relied on traditional materials like wood, plaster and marble, but this changed dramatically in the 1990s when she shifted primarily to fabric and started mining material from clothes she had accumulated over a lifetime. The act of sewing, rooted in youthful experiences restoring tapestry in her family’s textile workshop, took on symbolic meaning as a coping strategy for trauma and anxiety. Using worn fabric was also a way to explore themes related to memory, intimacy, fragility, femininity, family and the body. 

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Installation view of the exhibition "Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem." (photo by John Dean)

Moving through the Esker’s slate-coloured rooms, one becomes increasingly aware of Bourgeois’ facility with drawing, etching and stitching. With work ranging from the 1940s to the early 2000s, the exhibition highlights her meticulous craftsmanship and daring experiments, as well as the psychological relief she found through repetitive hand work. 

This is particularly true in relation to her most recognized and recurrent motif – the spider. In Ode à Ma Mère, a suite of nine prints in black ink, spiders are depicted in various forms and configurations. These poignant and haunting portraits pay homage to her mother and to the spider as a weaver and a protector against evil. 

Weaving and spider webs are also prominent motifs in her work, and she often used red, her favourite colour because of its reference to blood and violence. These come together in a 1998 suite of five Mixografia prints on handmade paper titled Crochet I-V. Bourgeois used red string as both a drawing tool and a representation of braided hair. The female body and the spider have been abstracted into shimmering red motifs through the act of weaving, twisting and knotting.

Other works include the sequential Hours of the Day, a print series related to the theme of time. Also remarkable is a series of six crimson holograms, which Bourgeois began making in 1998. Astoundingly, these intimately rendered holograms offer cages of domesticity that cocoon everyday objects like a bed or chair in unsettling spaces that simmer with psychological tension. Like memories, these shifting holographic images are ephemeral, leading viewers through the artist’s own version of the looking glass.

An enigmatic chronicler of her emotions, Bourgeois made an estimated 1,200 limited edition prints over her lifetime. At age 70, she became one of the few women to be accorded a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ■  

Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem, From the Collection of Jordan D Schnitzer and his Family Foundation at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from June 10 to June 27, 2021.

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