Galerie Hauser & Louise Bourgeois : "La Maladie de l'Amour"

Discover Louise Bourgeois' exhibition entitled La maladie de l'amour, which will be on view from 19 June to 25 September 2021 at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which is inaugurating in Monaco. The painter and sculptor, a major Franco-American artist who died in 2010, whose famous "spiders" - a monumental bronze sculpture - can be found in the garden bordering the gallery entrance, is known for her works exploring the body as a refuge.

She became famous from the 1970s onwards, particularly for her monumental installation sculptures. Close to abstract expressionism, the surrealists and the feminist movements without ever having joined them, Louise Bourgeois lived through the 20th century and died in 2010 at the age of almost 100. "If you can't bring yourself to abandon the past, then you have to recreate it, and that's what I've always done," explained this strong-willed woman. Yes, Louise has brought out of her memories and childhood traumas a work of incredible dreamlike power, in which she attacks the domination of the father or pays homage to her mother with gigantic sculptures such as the spider named Maman. The home, the family, the body and the sexual organs are thus founding subjects of her work and it is here that the love relationship in the work of Louise Bourgeois is explored in particular.

Announced by a bronze spider in the Jardins des Boulingrins, the exhibition features two other large pivoting aluminium sculptures from 2004. It questions the couple and its wanderings, from sculpture to drawing. Here, the visitor is confronted with the ambivalence of a Janus dressed in leather and the fusion of a fabric couple. The other appears so essential that it gives rise to the fear of abandonment and the inevitable solitude.