iCentre Pompidou · Beaubourg
Louise Bourgeois: Extreme tension
The BnF and Centre Pompidou combine their Louise Bourgeois holdings for the first time - some 200 drawings, prints and artist's books - in the artist's first Paris public-institution show since 2008. At the BnF Richelieu, Galerie Mansart.
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Preview: written before the show opened
Eleven large sheets work through the body from scalp to toes: the oesophagus, the gut, the pelvic bones, "pains and cramps", sweating. Louise Bourgeois made Extreme Tension in 2007, aged 95, around a text she first wrote in 1959, in shaky handwriting that ends on "the smell of the hunted animal". It sits at the centre of this show and gives it its name.
The BnF and the Centre Pompidou are pooling their Bourgeois collections for the first time. You start with a 1942 self-portrait and her first book, He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947). Then come knots of layered black lines, the Turning Inwards prints, new to French audiences, and a last section of red gouaches and dyed fabric.
Come for the drawings and prints, not the spiders: sculpture is limited to a handful of pieces. Tickets are €15 (€10 reduced) at BnF Richelieu, 5 rue Vivienne, in the Galerie Mansart. Tuesdays it stays open until 8pm.
Look for
Extreme Tension (2007)
Look for eleven large sheets where print, drawing and Bourgeois's trembling handwriting list the body part by part, ending with her as a hunted animal.
He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947)
Her first artist's book sets nine engravings opposite nine short texts she wrote, somewhere between an absurd tale and a building plan of the mind.
The red final section
Diluted red ink and dye bleed across paper and fabric in late images of couples, a child emerging from its mother and a pregnant man.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Nerding Out
Also at Centre Pompidou
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Image credits
9
- Louise Bourgeois: Extreme tension© The Easton Foundation / Adagp, Paris Photo © Crédit photographique : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Jean-Claude Planchet/ Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
- Mungo Thomson: Monument© Mungo Thomson. Courtesy l'artiste, galerie frank elbaz, and Karma.
- Yu Nishimura: Towards a SeaCourtesy of Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette
- Hélène Fauquet: VivresseCourtesy of Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette
- Centre PompidouAlf van Beem / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
- Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries LafayettePhilouSunshine, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Fondation Henri Cartier-BressonVVVCFFrance, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Musée des Arts et MétiersMarianne Casamance, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Bourse de Commerce - Pinault CollectionChabe01, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0