Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child

“The Woven Child” is the first major survey to focus exclusively on Louise Bourgeois’s fabric-based works. The exhibition charts the artists’s lifelong connection to textiles, and the memories they conjure, through a diverse body of sculptures, installations, drawings, collages, books and prints.

Bourgeois’s fabric works, that she only began working on in her eighties, are among her most compelling and intimate creations. The late decision to create artworks from her clothes and household textiles was a means of transforming as well as preserving the past. Bourgeois incorporated these objects, which held memories associated with specific places and people, into sculptural installations that are on display at the Gropius Bau.

In the final two decades of her life, Louise Bourgeois embarked on a daring new chapter in the development of her art. During this period she created an astonishingly inventive group of sculptures, drawings and installations that incorporated domestic fabrics, including clothing, linens and tapestry fragments, often sourced from her own household and personal history. Many of these late works returned to, and recalibrated, the core concerns and formal devices of her earlier art, exploring sexual ambiguities and harrowing psychological and social relationships.