If her emotions often overflow with freedom and sovereignty, Louise Bourgeois' art channels them and sublimates them into our reality. These emotions are embodied in iconic artworks, animated by a deep presence: spiders praising abandonment and protection, controlled spirals bursting with freedom or hands radiating friendship and love.

 

French living in New York, Louise Bourgeois spent time with great American post-war artists such as Pollock and de Kooning but never lost her artistic independence. Influenced by Dada as well as the surrealist movement, Bourgeois uses her art to delve into human relationships, father and mother figures, abandonment, desire, and identity. She is a consummate artist, expressing herself with all mediums; drawing, sculpture and in this case engraving. And what is more natural for this metal artist than tackling a copper plate to render her vibrant vision of fullness and love.

 

Le lit, gros édredon (with lips) is a print with drypoint, etching and aquatint. This work is composed of only a few elements: an iron bed, marital and solid, a generous quilt intertwined with long hair, all of which are elevated by floating lips in a room with blue walls and a red floor. These lips, which pay tribute to Man Ray's 1970 print A l'heure de l'observatoire, Les amoureux, reveal the memory of a peacefully fulfilled love, akin to her marriage with Robert Goldwater whose life she shared from 1937 until his death in 1973. The choice of colors and line makes for the simplicity of this artwork, which cleanses and retains only the essential emotion of an absolute love.

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Le lit, gros édredon (with lips) - 1997

Color drypoint, aquatint, engraving, etching, and soft-ground etching  on vellum paper, full margins

Signed, dated "97" and numbered on 100

Published by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Printed by Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York

63,2 x 79,4 cm

Provenance : European Private collection

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