at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (Through May 20, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
“My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” ㅡLouise Bourgeois, 1998
Produced in the last three years of her life, the effervescent bubble and flower doodles, rudimentary abstract patterns, and scrawled, Cy Twombly-like swirls currently lining the walls of Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, in Louise Bourgeois: Red Sky may seem like this renowned French-American painter, sculptor, and printmaker’s innocent, joy-filled ruminations on childhood, however, a closer look reveals a world of anguish and anxiety.
These quietly heartbreaking images are likely alluding to her troubled upbringing. Bourgeois was devastated by her overbearing father’s decade-long affair with her English tutor. She famously used art-making as a form of catharsis in dealing with her animosity and insecurity surrounding this distressing chapter in her life.
The viewer can clearly see her childhood bitterness and grief in her choice to use of elementary school media, including watercolors, penmanship practice paper, and colored pencils. This selection is especially ominous and hair-raising considering it is paired with splotchy, blurred, oozing, and scraped brushstrokes, all in crimson red. As if written in blood, these eleven gut-wrenching panels speak of a childhood marred by a catastrophic loss of innocence.
The color red is ubiquitous in the opening room of this exhibition. It immediately puts the viewer on-edge as they begin to contemplate the artist’s complex emotional connection to this hue. She believed red to be a window into the realm of pain, violence, depression, and the internal body. While many children of this age are full of curiosity and wonderment as they learn about the world around them and why the sky is a serene shade of blue, Bourgeois painting the sky red illustrates the manifestation of her inner trauma into the physical world of nature and paint. Additionally, this could also be a reference to the ancient adage, “Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.” As this blood-tinted firmament plagued her youth, the dawn of the artist’s life, we witness Bourgeois’s storm-like ferocity embedded in the paint here.
Just as the viewer begins to catch their breath from the emotional tidal wave experienced in the spacious initial gallery space, they are lead into a second, much smaller alcove, filled with large-scale wide tapestry-like etchings complete with microscopic corporeal imagery and haiku-like messages scribbled in pencil.
Tapestries meant a great deal to the artist as her family owned a tapestry restoration workshop as well as a gallery that mainly sold this antique drapery. As a young girl, Bourgeois would wash some of these hangings in the river. They would have to be wrung out to dry. While doing so, she would imagine twisting the neck of her father’s mistress.
An atmosphere of suffocation feels palpable in this cramped space. Even the etchings themselves are somewhat crumpled, reflecting this tapestry twisting. There is nowhere to run from the fervent emotion surrounding the viewer. Despite this sense of fury, we do see the artist’s efforts to evolve and move past this pain. In a few of these panels, we see Bourgeois use white-out to try and censor her writings. Perhaps this could just be another nod to elementary school materials, but we do see her try to evolve in a multi-panel text emblazoned with the words, “I cannot help this need in the morning / This need to grow / It is stronger than hunger or thirst.” Here, the word “grow” also has bodily connotations as these statements are interlaced with childlike sketches and fingerpaint-esque renderings of chromosomes and cells, revealing her strength and vitality, even in the winter of life.
As these panels also resemble both 19th-century biological drawings and medieval illuminated manuscripts, Bourgeois taps into the power of both science and religion to illustrate her journey towards peace, clarity, and resolution. However, this path is never an easy one and the works reflect this with their gruesome, fractured, and vaguely sexual tone. This lack of resolution is realistic but unendingly poignant and frustrating.
Installation view, Louise Bourgeois. The Red Sky. Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 2018. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Mario de Lopez
This unsettled and uncertain conclusion to the exhibition features thematic echoes of one of Emily Dickinson’s most beloved poems, I heard a Fly buzz – when I died. Here the narrator speaks of making all the preparations necessary for her own death. She would like it to be a peaceful affair surrounded by friends and family. However, when the moment itself arrives, the narrator hears a stubborn fly buzzing about the room, utterly ruining the atmosphere. Bourgeois had to confront her own symbolic fly, this childhood pain, even at the end of her life.
With the interplay of sexuality, morality, mortality, and childhood seen in Louise Bourgeois: The Red Sky, these songs of innocence and experience, these tender yet fiery works on paper, aid the viewer in the age-old quest to find meaning and understanding in times of turmoil. Although they were constructed at the tail end of her 98 years on this planet, these vigorous and spirited etchings crackle with youthful energy and speak heart to heart across the divide.
Installation view, Louise Bourgeois. The Red Sky. Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 2018. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Mario de Lopez
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Emily Nimptsch is Los Angeles Art Critic for Riot Material magazine. Ms. Nimptsch is also a freelance arts and culture writer who has written for Flaunt, ArtSlant, Artillery, ArteFuse, and Time Out Los Angeles.