Untitled, 2002 Nature Study, 1984 Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001 Untitled, 1997

The exhibition “Louise Bourgeois – Intimate Abstractions” is the first comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work in Berlin. It will show twentytwo sculptures and over ninety works on paper from 1943 to 2002. Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois grew up in Choisy-le-Roi, just outside the French capital. She began to study mathematics at the Sorbonne in 1932. She was interested in Euclidean geometry, whose forms offer an ideal organization of reality. The contact with uncertain non-Euclidean geometry in which all forms are subject to constant change disappointed her so much that she broke off her studies and attended various Parisian art schools. Non-linear formations appear again and again in her work. It was Fernand Léger who recognized her talent and encouraged her to work also as a sculptor. In 1938 she married the US-American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York. At first Louise Bourgeois still felt strongly dedicated to painting, but in the following years she turned more and more to sculpture. Her first exhibition of sculptural works was held at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949. She developed her own language of materials and forms in which human figure is melded with architecture or is dissolved entirely into geometric forms and abstractions. Located between figuration and abstraction, her highly allusive organic forms and body fragments have a strong sensual component. This sensuality moves between attraction and repulsion, between aggression and humorous tenderness. Already at the beginning of the 1960s she created her first “formless” objects out of unusual materials such as latex or plaster, anticipating the “Anti Form” (1968). During the eighties and nineties her works became more and more complex and more spatially referential, particularly the series “Cells” – again architecturally closed spaces, but also places of memory and escape. Since the first retrospective dedicated to her work in 1982 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Louise Bourgeois has enjoyed worldwide esteem for her artistic work. She is also currently working with sound and musical elements. An acoustic work will be presented in the atrium of the Akademie der Künste. Louise Bourgeois has remained dedicated to drawing during all of her artistic periods, a fact to which this exhibition renders homage by presenting over ninety works, more then forty of them from the years 2000 and 2001.