Louise Bourgeois’s Personages at Art Basel 2013

Hauser & Wirth

LOUISE BOURGEOIS PERSONAGES 1945–1955 at art basel 2013

LOUISE BOURGEOIS PERSONAGES 1945 – 1955 At its new location at Art Basel in Hall 2.0, Booth C10, Hauser & Wirth will present a rare selection of Louise Bourgeois's iconic 'Personages', bronze sculptures that secured the artist's status as one of the most important sculptors of contemporary art. Considered to be her first mature body of work, the Personages mark a radical departure from Bourgeois's studies in painting and drawing at the École des BeauxArts in Paris. Describing this transition, Bourgeois has said that she was unsatisfied with painting's 'level of reality', and that the move to sculpture made possible the creation of 'fantastic reality'.

Bourgeois unveiled her sculptures in three exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949, 1950 and 1953, filling the gallery space with strange totemic sculptures and abstract, biomorphic forms. Displayed as either stand-alone figures or arranged in couples and loose groupings, the Personages assume the postures of human figures engaged in the rituals of social space. Standing five or six feet tall, the works' size and bodily sense create a haunting presence.

Rather than put on an exhibition of separate objects, Bourgeois turned the Peridot Gallery into a kind of environmental installation, placing emphasis not on the dynamics produced between the works, the viewer, and the artist. Created between 1945 and 1955, the Personages were intended to serve as physical surrogates for the friends and family that the émigré artist had left behind in occupied France. In one instance, Bourgeois went so far as to carry the form of a 'portable brother' with her as she moved from room to room in her home. Reflecting the impossibility of reconciliation with those that she had left behind, the Personages are said to further embody the artist's anxieties and an emotional void, which she felt as a newly-wed, mother, and young artist in New York.

The process of casting her delicate wood and plaster Personages into bronze began in the late 1950s and continued throughout her life. Taking a cue from Giacometti, the Personages stood sans plinth or pedestal, directly on the floor. Different numbers of cut and stacked pieces allowed compositions to be viewed as bodies with legs, torso and head. Whereas Giacometti's forms are anchored with massive bases, Bourgeois's Personages get thinner toward the base and are top-heavy.

Louise Bourgeois, like so many artists during and after the Second World War, had adopted symbolic representation as a means to express the uncertainty of the age.

Abstracting figures, she sought to enable a universal language that would transcend time and national boundaries while allowing herself to express hidden conflicts stored deep within her unconscious. The astuteness by which Bourgeois managed to tap into the deep anxieties and emotions of the viewer, while also exploring her own specific needs, defined her early exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery. In a New York Times review of 'Abstract Expressionists in New York' at the MoMA in 2010, the critic wrote '…Bourgeois's totemic sculptures from the early 1950s … may be the most innovatively abstract and expressionist of postwar American sculptures'.

All of the works I call Personages refer to the size of my own body.

They reveal the extreme fragility that I felt. Their stiffness of form expresses the tenseness that I felt at that time.

Louise Bourgeois, 2000

Caption and courtesy information for individual works: Louise Bourgeois Untitled 1954 Painted bronze and stainless steel 141 x 55.2 x 30.5 cm / 55 1/2 x 21 3/4 x 12 in © Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke Louise Bourgeois Quarantania III 1949 Bronze and stainless steel 151.1 x 37.5 x 34.9 cm / 59 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 13 3/4 in © Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke Louise Bourgeois Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle 1947 – 1949 Bronze, painted white, and stainless steel 166.4 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm / 65 1/2 x 12 x 12 in © Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke Louise Bourgeois Untitled 1947-1949 Bronze, painted white and blue, and stainless steel 173.4 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm / 68 1/4 x 12 x 12 in © Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke Louise Bourgeois The Three Graces 1947 Bronze, painted white, and stainless steel 207 x 30.5 x 63.5 cm / 81 1/2 x 12 x 25 in © Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke

Caption and courtesy information for archival photographs: Louise Bourgeois with her sculpture on the roof of her apartment building in New York, c. 1944 Photo: © The Easton Foundation / Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / VAGA, NY Louise Bourgeois working on a Personage, 1949 Photo: © The Easton Foundation / Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust Louise Bourgeois's Personages in progress outside of her home in Easton CT, c. 1947 Photo: © The Easton Foundation / Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, NY Louise Bourgeois's exhibition at the Peridot Gallery, New York, 1950 Photo: Aaron Siskind, Courtesy The Easton Foundation Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, NY Louise Bourgeois's Personages in progress in the artist's studio, c. 1947 Photo: © The Easton Foundation / Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust Louise Bourgeois at her 1979 exhibition at Xavier Fourcade Gallery, New York Photo: Eeva Inkeri, © The Easton Foundation Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / VAGA, NY Installation view of 'Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective', Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008. Photograph: David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / VAGA, NY Louise Bourgeois with 'Quarantania III' and 'Brother and Sister', New York, 1979 Photo: Eeva Inkeri, © The Easton Foundation Art: © Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, NY