Room Guide - Room 7

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Bourgeois first began to work in marble during the late 1960s; becoming a regular visitor to the famous marble quarries around Carrara in Italy. The sculptures shown in this room have sensual, organic forms like those she had made earlier in latex and plaster. But this time they are carved from marble, as if to emphasise the contrast between their apparent softness and the actual hardness of the stone. The shapes also have an ambiguous quality, at once phallic and bulbous or breast-like, hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Other works represent parts of the body more clearly, a hand, arm or foot seeming to emerge from the rough stone.

The sculpture Ventouse, shown in this room, was made in 1990, and bridges two distinct stages of Bourgeois’s career. Here she combines a traditional sculptural technique with the more contemporary practice of using found objects: the glass cupping jars or ‘ventouses’ she found in a flea market. They are set into a block of marble, so that they echo the round protrusions in the marble sculpture called Cumul. This was something Bourgeois was to develop further in the ambitious installations she created throughout the 1990s.

enlarge this image Sleep II
1967
Marble, on two wooden timbers
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Peter Bellamy

enlarge this image Spiral Woman 1984
Bronze, hanging piece, with slate disc
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Christopher Burke

enlarge this image Nature Study 1984–94
Pink marble on stainless steel base
Private collection, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Allan Finkelman

enlarge this image Legs 1986
Rubber
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Rafael Lobato

enlarge this image Ventouse 1990
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Christopher Burke



Listen to the exhibition audio tour description from the show about this work

enlarge this image Arch of Hysteria 1993
Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois Photo: Allan Finkelman