Louise Bourgeois THE FABRIC WORKS

Authors:  Germano Celant

Collection: Contemporary Art

Publisher: Skira

Language: English

Year: 2010

Pages: 352

Colour Illustrations: 474

CONTENTS

A groundbreaking work edited by Germano Celant in collaboration with the artist 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.
• This collection of pictorial and sculptural images is brought together in this anthology in a unique and exhaustive way.
• The publication is a means of approaching her distinctive iconographic and visual explosions and adding to our knowledge of the artist herself.
• Bourgeois’s emotional and figurative strength, translated into compositions of colour and form, is further testimony to her important contribution to the history of modern and contemporary art.

Germano Celant, PhD in Contemporary Art and Theory, is author of more than one hundred publications. He is also the curator of hundreds of exhibitions in the most prominent international museums and institutions.