New and unique pieces by Louise Bourgeois at Galleri Andersson/Sandström

LOUISE BOURGEOIS - The Passage, 2007, Fabric and archival dyes printed on cloth, 131,4 x 101,6 x 5 cm - SOLD Photo: Christopher Burke

During September Galleri Andersson/Sandström in Stockholm exhibits new and unique textile pieces by French-American Louise Bourgeois. In the gallery space, the 97 year old artist presents eleven works on fabric, created between 2007 and 2009.

Louise Bourgeois is not only one of the world's leading contemporary artists, she is also one of the most versatile. Bourgeois' creative universe spans poetic drawings and prints, room size installations and sculptures in materials ranging from latex to marble. Through the act of creating, Louise Bourgeois is able to give her fears a physical form in order to exorcise them. The art keeps madness at an arm's length distance, to quote the artist herself: "Art is a guaranty of sanity". Memory, sexuality, love and abandonment are the core of her complex body of work.

The exhibition at Galleri Andersson/Sandström consists eleven pieces, two of which are unique variants, all of them created between 2007 and 2009. The technique is principally print on fabric - fabric that Bourgeois herself has used. In these works, as so often before, Bourgeois uses the body to explore the full range of the human condition. Here the motive is mostly women - female bodies with clouds of breast, fetuses in the womb or a child in their arms.

The mother and the woman are recurrent themes in Bourgeois' art. In the exhibition catalogue, Bourgeois expert Philip Larratt-Smith writes: "On the one hand, the return to the womb articulates the wish to merge completely with the lost mother. On the other, the womb, in Freud's formulation, is the "former home of all human beings" that carries the "seal of doom" and is the "object of an ‘uncanny' feeling". Hence the double-sided, Janus-faced nature of these images. Confronting her mortality Bourgeois reverts to the primary images of the passage into life, which, like the uncanny double of the mirror-image, announces the inevitability and proximity of death."

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris 1911. Since 1938 she resides in New York, but much of her inspiration derives from her early childhood in France. Bourgeois has worked as an artist throughout her adult life, but the great recognition came in connection with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1982-83. Today she is one of the big names of contemporary art. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. In Sweden, Kulturhuset mounted a major retrospective in 2002. This is Galleri Andersson/Sandström's second exhibition with Louise Bourgeois, the first took place in spring 2005 at the gallery in Umeå.

Press contact: Elisabeth Blennow, Director Stockholm, Sweden. +46 70-569 49 92, elisabeth@gsa.se.

Galleri Andersson/Sandström

Hälsingegatan 43

S-113 31 Stockholm

+46 90 14 49 90

+46 8 32 49 90

galleri@gsa.se

www.gsa.se