 Louise Bourgeois: The Angry Cat, 1999 Drypoint on paper, plate: 30.5 x 25.4 cm; sheet: 38.1 x 43.2 cm Roni Horn and Louise Bourgeois Drawings - curated by Jerry Gorovoy In a joint exhibition, Louise Bourgeois and Roni Horn present a selection of their fabric and pigment drawings. Jerry Gorovoy, a long-time assistant to Louise Bourgeois, is curator of the exhibition that has been designed specifically for Hauser & Wirth. The drawings of both artists essentially represent original creations while on the other hand constituting a parallel investigation to their sculptural work. The twenty or so works displayed show that Bourgeois and Horn are concerned with examining the relationship of the doubling of form, the paired form and the spiral form. Also apparent is their related sense of structure, order and chaos; the cutting and pasting in Roni Horn's drawings give them a corporeality similar that produced by the cutting and sewing of Louise Bourgeois' works. Louise Bourgeois' body of drawings, created over the last 60 years, exhibits an immense diversity of techniques, forms and motifs. The exhibition focuses on the fabric drawings composed between 2003 and 2006. Some of these works are being shown publicly for the first time, others could recently be seen in a comprehensive exhibition of her works in Vienna's Kunsthalle. For the fabric drawings, Bourgeois uses her clothes, tablecloths and bed linen. She sews these fabrics, usually striped, in concentric circles and spirals together to form spider-like or kaleidoscope-like patterns to produce an "esthetic tissue of linearities" so that the two-dimensional surfaces acquire a sculptural character through the fabric and the seams. The material used, the act of sewing and darning, as well as the recurrent motif of the spider's web are closely linked to her memories of her mother, who died at an early age and ran a workshop for restoring tapestries together with her husband. "I have always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole." Roni Horn works mainly with sculpture, drawing and photography, without favoring any of these media. Important individual exhibitions have been frequently dedicated to her body of drawings, such as in the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2003-04), in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel (1995) and in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1993). This exhibition displays a group of her pigment drawings produced since 1985. In looking at these abstract and extremely sublime drawings and contrasting them with the work of Bourgeois, the observer is struck by their formal similarities. Specks of red, green and blue pigment cohere in a fragmentary manner to form concentric circles and shape-pairs. These large-format drawings with words and fragments written in pencil result from the direct application of pigments onto paper followed by a process of scrupulously careful cutting into pieces and reconstituting them again. The pigment powder is applied to the paper with a little turpentine and then fixed by applying lacquer with a brush. The paper is finally cut up into strips and various geometrical shapes to be subsequently reconstituted again on a large sheet of paper that acts as a substrate, so that seams are produced just like in the fabric drawings of Louise Bourgeois. The composition created by cutting, pasting and recombining single fragments, like an assemblage, reveals the aims of a sculptress who engages with the nature of space and the relationship between individual elements. Louise Bourgeois (*1911 Paris) has lived and worked in New York since 1938. Next year, the Tate Modern in London will devote a comprehensive retrospective to the artist to coincide with her 95th birthday (planned stations: Centre Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art). Exhibition 3 June - 22 July, 2006 Gallery hours Tues-Fri 12 - 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 5 pm Hauser & Wirth Zürich Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zürich Telephone +41 (0)44 446 80 50 Fax +41 (0)44 446 80 55 Email zurich@hauserwirth.com www.hauserwirth.com |
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