Louise Bourgeois x Dimitris Yeros an Unseen Friendship by beowulfcompany

Louise Bourgeois x Dimitris Yeros an Unseen Friendship

9-19 June 2022 Zürich

A story of encounters

II.

The making of

III.

At home / in the studio

IV.

Louise & I

Capturing the crucial moment

A story of encounters

Paris, 10th of May 2022

At the beginning was an encounter with a spider in Tokyo. Everything started with Maman. Then our encounters would become recurrent: Shanghai, Bilbao, Paris, London, NYC… Disappearing and reappearing, The Mother is an encounter that is continually lost and found. A couple of years later I visited Louise Bourgeois’ house and studio in Chelsea, New York. Besides being fascinated by the home, I was deeply moved by the works and studio. It was the encounter of the person behind the artist. The reconstruction of memory was always a main focus of Bourgeois' work. A memory that younger generations keep reconstructing in several and endlessly creative ways. That’s why her work never ends, never dies, but remains an open invitation for renewed interpretation. I was touched to enter into the private space of an artist I’ve long admired. Seeing where her books, the blue couch, her red lipstick and her photos had been, was a silent witness of the pulsing heart where spiders are born. A new proximity emerged, a new form of intimacy. The first time I saw the photos of Dimitris Yeros the very same feeling returned. He invited me to another encounter with Bourgeois, closer to the person and to the creative soul behind Maman. Yeros’ portrayal is direct and clear. He shoots, he plays, he disguises. He blends dream and reality into a discrete but affirmed surreality. His work is the result of unexpected juxtapositions, of an unconscious revelation and consequent creation. This set of photos is the imprint of a precious moment of convergence between the unconscious of Yeros and Bourgeois. Somehow, by chance or skill, the aura of Bourgeois is preserved in the images. These photographs are the result of a friendship between two individuals, two artists.

The aim of this project was to bring to the fore another encounter with Louise Bourgeois through the lens of Dimitris Yeros. A work emerged from and dedicated to Friendship. I conceived and organised this exhibition as a space to share something about encounters: that of Yeros and Bourgeois, mine with the spider, and to pay tribute to the myriad other encounters that have created fantastic friendships like the ones that led to the making of this exhibition. I am very proud to bring this series of unseen photos to Zürich and to share it with the public. I hope you will be captivated by Yeros’ gaze, Bourgeois’ spider web, friendships old and new, and maybe some unpredictable extraordinary encounters ahead that art always creates. Valeria Diaz Granada Founder and CEO of BEOWULF Editor of ‘Louise Bourgeois x Dimitris Yeros: an Unseen Friendship’

pages 10-11 Louise Bourgeois ARE YOU IN ORBIT?, 2008 Etching, watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper 151.8 x 186.7 cm. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by ProLitteris, Zurich and VAGA at ARS, NY, Photo: Benjamin Shiff 8

Louise Bourgeois, MAMAN, 1999 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) , Athens Greece © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by ProLitteris, Zurich and VAGA at ARS, NY Photo: Dimitris Yeros - OSDEETE 2022

Τhe making of by Valeria Diaz Granada and Xanthi Skoulariki BEOWULF

It was early autumn of 2020 when we set out to launch BEOWULF in Europe; an art projects venture branching out of Tokyo, Japan. It was of course a very particular time in everyone’s life all around the world, as humanity was fighting for a healthier but also uncertain tomorrow in the midst of continuous lockdowns against the pandemic. Working under such extraordinary circumstances, conceiving and boldly going ahead with our ideas, we felt more and more drawn to the meaning of friendship -the magic, the tragic and the unforeseen- and this is when and how the seeds of the exhibition this book is accompanying and supplementing were laid into the creative ground of our thoughts and inquisitive minds. There are some types of friendships that are easier and more widely represented and some others that are generally overlooked, such being the soft, simply joyous friendships undecorated by drama or flamboyance, the quiet yet unlikely friendships. There are also some others that are woven by humanity and celebrate the understanding that posterity is made out of collected moments. This can often be said for the friendship of the artists and in extension, the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois x Dimitris Yeros: an Unseen Friendship’ examines and elegantly dissects exactly that. Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer who documented his friend the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois towards the end of her long life. For eight years (2000-2008), Yeros visited the famed townhouse that is now preserved by the artist's foundation. In this period, Bourgeois remained curious and connected with her friend and during his visits, a project was born: a series of unique portrait photos that Bourgeois co-signed with Yeros, and a series of limited edition portrait photos- whimsical, experimental, fun, raw, esoteric and contemplative- together with a set of photos of her domestic space (the so

called home-studio). In these home interior photos, her absence intensifies her presence; this everlasting presence of a person whose impact refuses to fade. “The home-studio of the great sculptor is quite very small and photographing her and the space wasn’t easy nor straightforward.” Yeros explained. He could barely use artificial lighting or work at the distances of his preference. On top of that, Louise wouldn’t always keep still, or didn’t like the stronger light and so the photo sessions would take place in weak natural light coming in from some window, or from the garden door or, later, the artificial light that emanated from a couple of functioning table lamps scattered in the space. This explains why some images don’t have the high definition that otherwise characterises the photography of Yeros. Nonetheless, this series does encapsulate in the best way the atmosphere of the domestic environment in the house on 20th street. Bourgeois is actively participating with a repertoire of moods. Almost all of the photographs displayed in this exhibition have never been shown before, whether individually or as a body of work. By displaying them in a residential address, we hope to do justice to both artists in an intimate, lived-in space on a leafy and quiet street of Zürich. The love and tenderness between the two artists is evident in this collaborative project that lets the viewer imagine their perpetual dialogue. In celebration of the friendship of Yeros and Bourgeois, we present you with a copy of this limited edition book especially produced to accompany and enrich the exhibition beyond the walls of the two houses in New York and Zürich.

In the pages that follow, we have curated a selection of photos from the project by Dimitris Yeros originally titled 'Casual Moments'. Yeros has also written his personal memoirs of those days spent with Louise Bourgeois at her home. Simon Baker, Director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) has contributed an essay on the narrative of the lives of the artists in the realm of their studio, and Fernando Geberovich, psychoanalyst, author and collector, closes this book with an essay that offers a lyrical view into the esoteric and psychological dynamics that emanate from the photographs and transcend into the perennial existential pursuits of the human mind. This exhibition would not have been possible without the contribution of Iridanos Tsirigkoulis of Roma Gallery in Athens. We are especially thankful to Kay and Karin Hofmann Hunkeler and Beatrix Németh for welcoming the exhibition at Villa de Sein and making us feel at home. Entrepreneur and collector Pietro de Rothschild for his patronage in supporting the making of this exhibition. We thank them all for their contribution, friendship and genuine belief they have shown towards bringing this ‘tale of two artists’ to light and life.

“Have you brought me something to look at?” Louise Bourgeois to Dimitris Yeros during a visit of his on the 15th of May, 2010

At home / in the studio by Simon Baker, Director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris

Artists’ studios are magical spaces, necessary for both the production and understanding of the works of art made in them. On the one hand, as anyone who has visited an artist’s studio, or even just seen images of them will know, they are full of information: evidence of the ways in which artists work, the materials they use, the ways these materials are used, and often also the stages through which ideas pass from conception to realisation. These signs or traces, indices perhaps, are all essentially matters of production. But there is another deeper and more complex sense in which the places where artists live and work inform our understanding of their art, which relates not to the logics of process or practice, but instead to that of interpretation and understanding; the ways in which we attribute meaning to the work of an individual artist. Any work of art seen on a gallery wall or in a museum requires us to imagine the person who created it. If this were not so, we, as spectators would be obliged to think that it was we, rather than someone else who had ‘imagined’ the image or object in some strange, impossible way. And while it is clear that there is a shifting balance in the freedom of interpretation: our ability to see things for ourselves in a work of art, versus the artist’s clear or opaque intentions, even our own readings of artworks are determined by the kind of character and personality we imagine as having created them. This is clearest perhaps when we think of extreme examples: reading distress or chaos in the work of a heavy drinker or desire in that of a serial philanderer. This is precisely the wisdom identified long ago by John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing when he shows a painting by Vincent Van Gogh and then tells us that it was the last painting he produced before he committed suicide. It becomes unthinkable, unimaginable

to disconnect the personal drama from the brushstrokes: the turmoil on the surface of the painting from that beneath the surface of the personality. And the pitfalls of this tendency are equally clear: the psycho-biographical reading of the work of an artist which depends entirely on some things we know (or think we know) about their life, but which, finally, maybe nowhere present in a particular work. It is tempting and easy to read art in this way, and sometimes it may help, but it leaves us in the strangest positions as spectators. Imagine the scenario in a very limited way: we (I, or you, not both) are standing in front of a work of art, we know from a label on the wall the name of the artist, the date of its creation, and the materials from which it was made. If the artist is well-known, if we know something about them and their lives, it is almost impossible not to use this when trying to make sense of the work for ourselves. If we know nothing about the artist we are forced to try to imagine what kind of person made this work. How then, might this relate to the studio? How might we ‘read’ the space in which an artist lives and works as a complement to the way in which we construct the character of the artist in order to understand their work. The history of art is littered with instructive examples of studio/homes that dramatize and bring to life this tendency, many of which we can summon to mind even in the absence of specific photographs: the roiling chaos of Francis Bacon’s studio in which everything seems doomed entropically to tend towards one immense creative effort; the cool, up-state calm of the house in which Philip Guston’s worked late in his life, replete with the little paintings he never wished to part with; Agnes Martin somewhere outside, way out in the silent desert. And then, how about Louise Bourgeois, living and working in New York City for so long that the telephone area codes changed around her? Bourgeois’ home,

made visible alongside portraits of the artist by Dimitris Yeros have much to tell us if we care to look, both in terms of process and interpretation. We can see paints, pencils, papers, lamps and tables, the ‘supports’ for the more immediate hand-made aspects of the artist’s late work. We are far from the language or logic of cages or giant spider sculptures. Instead we might imagine some kind of productive intimacy; the places where ideas take shape, where reflection in the comfort of homely surroundings find their form on paper. But beyond this, we are offered, whether Bourgeois is present or not in the photographs, a glimpse of a radically simple life about as far from the grandeur of blue-chip galleries and international museums as it is possible to imagine. Personally, I have seen this before, especially with painters: often what they actually need to work is humbling. With Bourgeois, however, who might lay claim to being truly one of the few artists whose career, as it grew and expanded in ambition and scale, never dipped an inch in terms of quality, it is almost impossible to reconcile the modesty and sincerity of her home, the place in which she is truly ‘at home’ with the rhetoric that has grown around her work. The phone numbers charcoaled onto the wall; a bewildering array of extremely fragile-looking lamps; chipped, cracked and peeling paintwork; hard uncomfortable stools and chairs, endless tiny scraps of paper and images pinned in giant, layered clouds; long-kept mementoes and keepsakes; a fur coat on an old iron hook, these are the signs that help us understand not the life-story of an artist, her biography, but instead the everyday reality of her needs and routines, the bare necessities for creativity.

“Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because then at least you know your limits.” Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois I SEE YOU!!! (#4), 2008 Etching, watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper 144.5 x 58.1 cm. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by ProLitteris, Zurich and VAGA at ARS, NY, Photo: Benjamin Shiff 40

Louise and I by Dimitris Yeros, artist / photographer

I met Louise for the first time in early summer 2000, when she was 89 years old, and the very same day I photographed her.

She was living in an old brownstone of only a few stories in the Chelsea area of New York, where now her Foundation is housed. It is about five meters wide and double that in length. The parlor floor was the only space she occupied at the time. She spent a lot of her free time seated by a window looking out on the street, watching the passersby. As I had lots of friends living in the area, I would often walk along her street and see her behind the window. I would wave hello to her and she would return my greeting with a smile. The newest object in her home must have been bought a very long time ago and it seemed as if the house hadn’t been dusted off for about as long. There was little furniture, if one could call it that, and only the very basic items. The left-hand wall in the back room of the house was covered in yellowed clippings and posters, and the wall opposite was filled with shelves piled with her personal dust-covered papers and books. It was in this back room where a long sofa that doubled as Louise’s bed had been placed, next to a table that also served as her desk. Every Sunday at 3pm, she would open her home to receive visiting artists, most of whom she was unwilling to see individually, and occasionally an art critic or a museum director. I found most of those Sundays to be filled with ennui and for that reason I went there only a couple of times and this upon her insistence. I would meet her two or three times a year and only during weekdays, yet we would chat on the phone much more often. Her memory was strong when it came to people and events of the past. Once in a while, she would mention

the gallerist Alexander Iolas and ask whether he was still alive. Amongst other jokes we shared, she had a lingering memory of an old photograph I had taken, depicting a boy in his teens with snails crawling all over his naked torso. Each time she would tell me how much she would love a plate of snails cooked in red sauce, parsley and garlic, and the desire would make her eyes sparkle. She loved talking about Greece and was hugely entertained by jokes she was asking me to read out loud to her with my heavy accent, even though hers wasn’t much better. As the years passed, mobility problems started to take over and, as a result, we would sit in the second room that overlooked the neglected garden, filled with shrubs and tall trees — a refuge for pigeons. It was on Saturday, May 15th, 2010, at 6pm, when I met Louise for the last time. I found her seated in the same old chair, the one loaded with cushions for added height and comfort, and her legs were covered with the characteristic red blanket she was using at the time. The room was almost dark, lit only by a couple of ancient and wrecked table lamps. Nothing had changed in all those years, including the stools the guests would sit on at the Sunday Salons — these too remained in their very same spots. Louise also remained the same. In the last five years or so, it was impossible to see any noticeable change in her appearance or in her manner, and she got me thinking that indeed she had cheated time and that she would carry on in this way for a long time. “Louise, remember Dimitri?” asked her assistant Jerry Gorovoy when I entered the room. “Dimitri, Dimitri who?” she asked back. When Jerry offered my surname, my aged friend said an abrupt “Yes” in her French accent. I gave her my hand and asked her how she was doing. “Fine!” came back the answer in a low, husky voice. I sat opposite her and, as we were chatting, I saw her closing her eyes, tired. She would suddenly interrupt with various questions: “Have you

brought me something to look at?” “Some photos of yours and I would like you to sign them,” I replied and gave her the portraits I had done much earlier. “Nice” was her comment for the first photo, as she signed her name underneath it with big letters. I gave her nine photos but by the third signature her hand got tired and the letters started changing shape. We paused, took a rest and continued with the remaining ones a while later. “Would you care for a drink?” she asked me and lifted the old tin cup in which there was always a pop soda with a straw. I replied I was OK. Regardless, she asked an assistant to offer me brandy. I was familiar with what was to follow, as I had lived through that scene enough times: when she offered me a glass of brandy, she would accompany it with songs of Jean Sablon and so Jerry put the CD on. I spent quite some time with Jerry, who showed me some beautiful red watercolor drawings she had done recently. I watched her with her bony hands resting on the table, sometimes staring at us with eyes half shut, and at other times returning to the aged yet modern world of hers by shutting her eyes completely. Four days after this visit, I was to travel to Mexico. Jerry encouraged me: “When you’re back, come and see us and, if Louise is in a good mood, then take some more photos.” I had photographed Louise plenty of times and, given that the photographs were also appreciated by Wendy Williams, her studio manager at the time, the idea of an exhibition was on our minds from back then. Therefore, one more sitting would have been very useful indeed. On June 1st, I was still in Mexico, in Oaxaca. It was early morning when I met Francisco Toledo, one of the most important Mexican painters. I found him at the Institute he had founded for young artists studying engraving. Francisco was the same as always: stressed,

humble, shy, a man of few words. We stood there talking and on a table next to us were three books by Bourgeois, evidence of the wide acceptance she enjoyed in the international artists’ community, extending all the way to a relatively small and poor provincial town. Suddenly he spoke with deep sorrow: “I’m seventy years old, Dimitri, and I’m afraid I’m going to die”, which only reminded me of the extent of his hypochondria. So to encourage him and comfort him, I pointed to Louise’s books and said: “What are you talking about? Look at Louise — she’s a hundred years old and still creative.” Coming back to my hotel a bit later, I turned on the computer to read my emails and in the inbox there was a message from Wendy which read:

“Dear Dimitri, I am sure you have heard Louise left us yesterday morning. Even though we knew this day was approaching, we are having a hard time accepting she is no longer with us… We believe Louise will live forever. With our warmest wishes Jerry and Wendy”

“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands” Louise Bourgeois

“I need my memories, they are my documents”

Louise Bourgeois

“For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture” Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois À BAUDELAIRE (#1) [center right detail], 2008 Etching, ink, watercolor, gouache, pen, and pencil on paper 151.1 x 99.7 cm. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by ProLitteris, Zurich and VAGA at ARS, NY, Photo: Benjamin Shiff 72

Capturing the crucial moment by Fernando Geberovich psychoanalyst, author & collector, Paris

In the summer of 2000, at the very dawn of the 21st century, a new friendship was in the making. At the age 89, Louise Bourgeois had already earned the respect and acclaim of the art world when she opened the doors of her house to Dimitris Yeros, as she opened the doors of her house to Dimitris Yeros, a Greek artist and photographer from the old continent. Not wasting any time, this day was the first of many that Yeros spent photographing Bourgeois. When Yeros’ camera with his uncompromising gaze captured the artist in her raw essence, this fruitful encounter between the two of them grew into a story of love and friendship. It is through these encounters that the miracle of philia did occur, however if it was not there, it would be irremediable. “Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that” wrote Cicero. Yeros in his chronicles of the Salons on Sundays, written three years before Louise Bourgeois’ demise, reflects Cicero. Bertrand Russell wrote “If by magic we suddenly had the power to read the minds of others, the first consequence would be to break up all friendships”. If such a cruel description is friendship, it would be on the condition that a friend is someone who knows you well and loves you anyway. This intense and lively relationship between the two, allowed for the sharing of the spoken, the unspoken, and of the silent innermost thoughts. It was asymmetrical, yet it stayed within a defined framework and followed a ritualised protocol. What comes under the heading of friendship is not unlike the protocols of analytical treatment. We know that the life and work of Louise Bourgeois were inextricably linked to psychoanalysis. Bourgeois' analysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld lasted thirty two years from 1952 to 1985, and was interrupted only by the death of the analyst. We also know that Bourgeois had always been very interested in psychoanalytic literature, having devoured pages and pages

of it, both before and during her analysis. Her artistic work can be seen as a continuation of the analytical work through what can be described as ‘creative action’ until the end of her life. According to Freud, “It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs”[1]. And Bourgeois remarked that “the artist has the “privilege [ of] access to the unconscious. It is a fantastic privilege to have access to the unconscious […] this is really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of selfrealisation.”[2] A fortiori, this communication from inconscious to inconscious is fully deployed in the regular ‘framed’ exchanges of Louise Bourgeois and Dimitris Yeros, two artists. This is where the comparison with the analytical frame reaches its limit. The photographer’s eye is neither neutral nor benevolent. Yeros wouldn’t have necessarily considered the analysis of his friend. Nevertheless, these sessions have punctuated the last ten years of an uninterrupted self-analysis through creation. A finite and infinite analysis. But fortunately, the photographer’s eye and his work here transcends the critical severity of his gaze as deployed in these Salons on Sundays. In his photographic capture of Louise Bourgeois’ last years, Yeros is a worthy inheritor of the purest artistic tradition in the field of classical Greek and Roman painting. A dialogue between the ancient Greek painter Parrhasios of Ephesus and Socrates expresses the ideal of ancient painting. Three stages mark out the ascent from the visible to the invisible: first, painting represents what we see (the imitation of nature), then beauty, and finally the moral expression of the soul, ‘the physical disposition at the crucial moment’, i.e. the moment immediately before or after death. Parrhasios had a slave tortured to death in front of his easel to capture the expression on his face at the very moment of his agony. Out of breath, the slave

says “Parrhasios, I’m going to die!” and Parrhasios replies “Stay like that” and finishes his painting. Like Parrhasios, Yeros captured this never-ending passage from life to death of his model, an author of the animate. It is in this way that the photographic journal looking at the life of Bourgeois captures in images “the moment when the word falls silent”[3]. The photographer catches the signs announcing the end of Bourgeois’ life, which is also the end of her infinite psychoanalysis. Yeros’ photography searches for the crucial moment under the apparent serenity of his model. In these photos Bourgeois stands still, undecided between the moment just before “pouncing on her prey” in reaction to the creative act, and the moment just after that, reaching the ataraxia of the gods in death. Yet, as Lucretius wrote, “stillness is only a slowness that is not perceptible to the naked eye.”[4] The living images of the photographer observing Bourgeois’ later years reveal in a plastic way what the word keeps silent: the moment of aphanisis. This term, derived from the Greek language, designates “the disappearance of desire and the fear of this disappearance in both men and women”. Unbeknownst to her, the photos of Yeros lie in wait for this feeling of fear in Louise Bourgeois, which, through the infinite analysis that constitutes her creative work, is clearly expressed in the red gouaches of her last years, full of babies and maternal breasts, but also in two prints from 2000, with evocative titles: Do Not Abandon Me and Umbilical Cord. This fear of separation is explicit again in 2009, in her work I am afraid which concludes with this sentence, like a scream: “THE FALLING INTO A VACUUM SIGNALS THE ABANDONMENT OF THE MOTHER”. It is said that someone who has undergone psychoanalysis has the availability of his or her history, and therefore an acquired freedom for what

remains to be lived. To be able to lose the past and dispose of one’s future. This goal was partially achieved by Bourgeois. She struggles to lose, sublimate, and dispose of herself, while at the same time not being able to lose her past: it is a past that does not pass. Her Cell I installation from 1991 bears witness to this, with its phrase: “I need my memories. They are my documents”. Her space is both dead and alive. The photographer captures this effort to the very end of his model’s life. The photos also express the vital force, the creative energy of Bourgeois, whose desire for analysis and desire for life remain infinite. Thus, the photos reveal this frontier between life and death, this aphanisis of desire undecided between these two extremes: the origin and the end. On the one hand, towards the nostalgia of a fusion with a mother from whom she has never separated; on the other hand, towards a serene and adult acceptance for the end of life. This is expressed, for example, in her 2008 sculpture Conscious and Unconscious. Yeros’ photographs remain on the cusp between the English still life and the French nature morte. What is important in these photos is how the photographer captures the eternal liveliness of Louise Bourgeois rather than her passage to eternal life. It could therefore be said nostalgically that “photography is a mirror that remembers”...yet “There are cases where old age gives not an eternal youth, but on the contrary, a sovereign liberty, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to send into the future a line that crosses the ages: Titian, Turner, Monet”[5]. The photos of Yeros reveal this infinite quest for the future in the work and life of Louise Bourgeois.

[1]. J. Mitchell. "Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux, The Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art" in Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter. (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021), 131. [2]. Donald Kuspit, An Interview with Louise Bourgeois (New York: Elizabeth Avedon, 1988), 68. Quoted by J. Mitchell. "Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux, The Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art" in Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter. (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021), 131. [3]. According to P. Quignard in Le sexe et l’effroi, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 53 et 55. [4]. Lucretius, De natura rerum, in P. Quignard, op.cit. p. 64 [5]. G. Deleuze et F. Guattari. What is philosophy? Ed. de Minut, 2005. p. 7 79

Bourgeois' favourite CD of Jean Sablon. 84

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Dimitris Yeros (b. 1948) is a Greek artist and photographer of international acclaim and one of the most influential artists of his generation. Yeros has had 58 individual international exhibitions in: Köln, Düsseldorf, New York, Kassel, Strasburg, Oxford (Oxford University), Darmstadt, Indiana-USA (Ball State Art Gallery), Heidelberg, Nicosia, Milan, Bochum (The Bochum Museum), Berlin, Wuppertal, Michigan (Kelsey Museum) Mannheim, Mexico City, Taipei, Museum of Modern Art Barranquilla- Colombia and elsewhere. He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, Biennials and Triennials in many parts of the world. His work is found in many museums worldwide, such as Tate Britain, Getty LA, International Center of Photography/New York, Maison Europeene de la Photographie/Paris, British Museum, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Tama Art Museum/Tokyo, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of International Contemporary Graphic Art/Norway, Musée d'Art Contemporaine Chamalières, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Harry Ransom Center, The Leslie-Lohman Museum, The Joseph M. Cohen Family Collection, Fondazione Benetton, Barranquilla Museum of Modern Art.

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The 19th century brownstone and home-studio of Louise Bourgeois in New York as photographed by Dimitris Yeros, now the location of Easton Foundation. 102

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Page 28 “Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because then at least you know your limits. Louise Bourgeois, “Any answers?,” The Guardian, 26 February 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/feb/26/1 Page 56 “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.” Louise Bourgeois about her work Helping Hands for Jane Addams Memorial in Chicago Women’s Park and Gardens. Also quoted in Art:21. Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 September 28, 2011 https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/louise-bourgeois-inidentity-segment/ Page 65 “I need my memories, they are my documents.”

Louise Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1992), p. 184.

Cover: a handwritten dedication from Louise Bourgeois to Dimitris Yeros Layout: Thymios Presvytis Production: Peak design

ISBN: 979-10-699-9471-3

Publication copyright: BEOWULF Images copyright: © Dimitris Yeros - OSDEETE 2022 Louise Bourgeois' art, writings, personal photographs, and archival materials are © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by ProLitteris, Zurich and VAGA at ARS, NY

This limited edition publication was exclusively produced by BEOWULF to supplement and accompany the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois x Dimitris Yeros: an Unseen Friendship’, 9-19 June 2022, in Zürich, Switzerland. The exhibition is produced by BEOWULF and supported by Pietro de Rothschild. The publication is limited to 300 numbered copies and is being offered gratis.

copy nr.

/300

With special thanks to Kay and Karin Hofmann Hunkeler and Beatrix Németh for their generous gesture of opening Villa de Sein to BEOWULF for the exhibition and the overall organisational support.

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