Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Over a seven-decade career, French-American artist Louise Bourgeois cemented herself as one of the greats of 20th-century art. This summer, Bourgeois’s work will be the subject of the first major solo exhibition in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new North Building.
Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day is the largest survey of the artist’s work ever to be exhibited in the Asia-Pacific. Guests will be launched into Bourgeois’s world from the get-go: her iconic large-scale sculpture Maman will be installed in the forecourt of the gallery’s South Building. Nine metres tall and 10 metres wide, the 1999 bronze, steel and marble work was dedicated to the artist’s mother, who she described as, “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing ... and [as] useful as a spider”.
More than 120 works spanning Bourgeois’s incredible career, from her beginnings in Paris to her later years working in New York City, will be found throughout the North Building, including the subterranean Tank exhibition space, a former World War II oil tanker. The exhibition showcases the breadth of Bourgeois’s talents, from fabric sculpture to works on paper, bronzes and mechanised sculptures, revealing the themes she explored throughout her career: intimacy, human relationships, womanhood and selfhood.
To complement the exhibition, American artist Jenny Holzer has made a series of contributions drawing from Bourgeois’s diaries and psychoanalytic writing, while works by musician and composer Kali Malone will further enhance the experience.
Tickets go on sale on September 6.
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