Although French artist Louise Bourgeois is best known for her huge sculpture and installation art, her lesser-known early paintings will go on display at one of the world’s most renowned galleries.
“Louise Bourgeois: Paintings” is the latest exhibition to open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) and is dedicated to paintings made around World War II in the years after her arrival in New York in 1938.
In the late 1940s, Bourgeois (1911-2010) turned away from painting and concentrated mainly on sculptures, above them the meter-high spider sculptures that are seen and known around the world today.
The Met’s exhibition is the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic French-American artist between her arrival in New York and her turn to sculpture.
While Bourgeois is best known today as a sculptor, it is in this early body of work that her artistic voice emerged, establishing a core group of visual motifs that she would continue to explore and develop throughout her celebrated, decades-long career. Informed by new archival research, the exhibition sheds light on a little-known chapter in the artist’s practice, according to the Met’s official website.
The show at the Met in New York’s Central Park is scheduled to run until August 7. ♦
