Louise Bourgeois. The Fabric Works

Louise Bourgeois, who has produced art since the 1930s, began in the 1990s to use her clothes and the clothes of her loved ones as components in her sculptures and drawings. It is as much a reincarnation of her past and her childhood as a confirmation of her relationship with memory. Her visual approach to fabrics transforms decorative accessories into emotional and personal references which, especially in her Cells and later in her drawings, create representations of a tormented and at the same time powerful womanhood. Further development of the artist’s work began in 2002: exploiting the iridescent colours and formal structural properties of pieces of her clothing, she created “The Fabric Drawings,” astonishing works alternating between floral figurative pieces and chromatic abstractions. This set of images is collected here in its entirety for the first time, constituting the closest thing yet to a general catalogue.