Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child: Ralph Rugoff exhibition tour
‘There’s a very playful sense of the types of transformations we associate with fairytales and myths, where someone’s turned into a tree, or someone grows a tail’.
Time for a real treat, a behind-the-scenes tour of Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, from Ralph Rugoff, as the Hayward Gallery Director leads us through the artist’s approach via some of his favourite pieces.
In this video, Rugoff discusses some of the themes of Bourgeois’ fabric works, a number of which use materials the artist had collected during her lifetime. He looks at how these items help tell a narrative of a past both experienced and evolved into something else through memory.
We also look more closely at the artist’s fabric heads, starting with her very first sculpture of this series in 1998, and explore how Bourgeois’ works are often open-ended, displaying conflicting, or contradictory emotion, reflecting a personal experience back onto the viewer.
‘As much as her work is about the past, there’s a recognition that the past we hold in our heads, is a past we’ve transformed with our imagination. It’s not reality, it’s something else.’
The first major retrospective of the artist to focus on her later fabric works, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child was at Hayward Gallery 9 February – 15 May 2022.
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