EVENT LANGUAGE: GERMAN.

The early painterly work of Louise Bourgeois as a discovery in the anniversary year: for the first time in Europe, the Belvedere is showing the early paintings of one of the most important artists of our time in a large solo exhibition. The show in the baroque rooms of the Lower Belvedere sets Bourgeois’ paintings of the 1940s in dialogical relation to later sculptures, spatial installations and graphics. It was not until the 1980s that Bourgeois received recognition for her artistic work and gained international visibility with her monumental spider sculptures and room-filling cells. But it was in her early oil paintings, between 1937 and 1949, that the Franco-American artist developed her distinctive artistic vocabulary and defined the content that runs throughout her work. In her oeuvre, which spans across media and seven decades, Louise Bourgeois succeeds in uniting opposites such as figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious.

In a tour of the exhibition, curator Johanna Hofer talks about recurring motifs in Louise Bourgeois’ artistic practice, such as the house, the tree, the figure, the knife, the hair, the spiral, the tear, and how these become metaphorical bearers of meaning in the paintings, which are later revisited in different techniques and materials.

Registration required. FULLY BOOKED.