Louise Bourgeois: Selected Prints

For over half a century Bourgeois has produced a vast and complex body of work possessing a potent and distinctive vision. At the age of eighty four she continues to produce some of her most accomplished and emotionally charged work to date.

The major feature of this show is the Triptych for the Red Rooms, a three part aquatint with drypoint and engraving. The Red Rooms, concurrently on show in the Tate’s Rites of Passage exhibition and the culmination in a series of Cells that Bourgeois has created since 1992, are a reference both to the human body and a prison. Each room embodies the alternately harmonious and confusing relationship between the child and the parents.

Like The Red Rooms, the Triptych is an emotional narrative evoking a child’s ambivalent tie to its parents. The central panel shows a female figure; her body is developed but her umbilical cord is still intact. She appears to be escaping her parents who stand left and right. The same hysterically arched figure struggles with her father in the right panel, and with her mother in the left. However, in contrast to The Red Rooms, the Triptych is printed in blue, a calming colour.

Bourgeois’ memories of her own childhood and her identity as a mother are similarly reflected in An Autobiographical Series (1994), a set of 14 etchings which charts her own birth and childhood and recounts her unique life story. The phsychosexual drama of the early years of her life is explored here with a lucidity and directness that only a distance from the past can provide.