Rugby Art Gallery and Museum are the first venue to present a new ARTIST ROOMS touring exhibition celebrating the work of legendary artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). This exhibition brings together a collection of Bourgeois’ sculptures, drawings and prints produced in the last twenty years of her life, a period of extraordinary creativity during which the artist re-articulated many of her lifelong concerns in newly provocative and profound ways, including her exploration of identity, gender, childhood, family relationships, and memory.
In her remarkable eight-decade career, Bourgeois created a body of work which is beguiling, psychologically charged and endlessly inventive, ranging from monumental installations to figurative sculptures and abstract collages. Bourgeois was the first women to be given a sculpture retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982, and the first artist to have an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2000.
I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...
Louise Bourgeois
Bourgeois’ art was closely bound up with her life, and she used artmaking as a way of making sense of her experiences. Her sculpture, drawing and writing are characterised by an unflinching emotional honesty, as she continually retold and reworked the memories and stories that shaped her life. With a compelling need to make and re-make, she explored different forms and materials to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining carved marble, cast bronze, wood, latex or stitched and stuffed fabric and found objects.
