May 6 – June 12, 2023

Opening Reception Thursday, May 6, 5:30 - 7:30pm

Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce its new exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Mother and Child. The gallery's fifth exhibition of Bourgeois' work will present recent sculptures, gouache drawings and mixed media print works.  

Since its first exhibition of Louise Bourgeois' work to San Francisco in 1987, Gallery Paule Anglim has offered California and the Western U.S. firsthand views of the legendary artist's work ranging from her early wood Personnage constructions and ink drawings (1987) to her legendary Spider sculptures (1996) to her sewn assemblage sculptures made from her own clothing and household items (2003) to her published artist books, sewn prints and latest drawings (2005). In 2007, the gallery assisted the San Francisco Arts Commission in the dramatic presentation of Crouching Spider on the city's waterfront.

With Mother and Child Bourgeois presents visceral, essential images from the cycle of human life: on birth, death, sexuality and the creative power of the mother. In saturated red gouache, her drawings explore the shapes marking the transition from woman to embryo to child to girl to woman. The artist's wet paper absorbs the blood-red watercolor medium, revealing the figures with an honest immediacy, speaking to the process of creation, of formation through liquid.  

Two bronze sculptures from Bourgeois' Echo series will be central to the artist's presentation. Biomorphic shapes, reminiscent of bodies (and its internal organs), emerged from the artist's experiments with clothing. Old sweaters, stuffed and saturated with liquid, were hung --and the shapes cast in bronze. Ranging from three to six feet high, they relate to the human form, as if released from its skeleton.

Louise Bourgeois' sixty-year career has been the focus of exhibitions in many international museums, and of many publications.  Her two major traveling retrospectives: MoMA (1982-84) and Tate Modern (2007-9) paid tribute to her reputation as one of the world's most important living artists. In 1993 her work represented the United States in the US Pavillion at the Venice Bienniale.