You need a mother. I understand
but I refuse to be your mother because
I need a mother myself.
Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, 16 March 1975
We are inside the Museo Novecento in Florence, Italy. A space dedicated to 20th and 21st century Italian art located in an ancient catholic convent just inside the city center.
In addition to a permanent collection, the museum offers exhibitions and exhibition cycles, installations and special projects.
The Museo Novecento, on the tenth anniversary of its founding, presents a major exhibition dedicated to Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911 – New York, 2010), one of the most important modern and contemporary artists of the last centuries, best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.
“I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need to physically act out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.” – Louise Bourgeois
Her childhood was marred by a complicated relationship with her family. She transposed these dynamics into her artistic practice, attempting to investigate the motivations of the psyche and the unconscious , and seeking to express that which is unspeakable and repressed.
Throughout her long and productive career, Bourgeois interpreted the creative process not only as a way of processing the past, but even as a form of exorcism, creating an uncanny poetics capable of alleviating her trauma.
The title of the exhibition, Do Not Abandon Me, refers to Louise’s unsettling experience of abandonment and the desire for connection. In fact, her mature collections often found expression in the mother-child dyad, which is understood as the basis for all future relationships. In particular, the gouaches dating from the last five years of her career, which from the heart of the exhibition, explore the cycles of life through an iconography of sexuality, procreation, birth, motherhood, nurture, dependency and the family unit.
For the first time in Florence, a selection about one hundred works by Louise Bourgeois is exhibited, including a wide selection of late gouache drawings, sculptures of various sizes and one of the artist’s renowned Cell installations.The exhibition is spread between the ground floor galleries, the cloister, which host the monumental work titled Spider Couple (2003), and the first floor of the museum.
The largest works in the exhibition feature subjects dear to the artist, the spider and the Cell; they are exhibited in close dialogue with the architecture of the former Leopoldine convent, founded in the 13th century and run by women for ages. Within these spaces, Bourgeois’ works connect with the nature and history of the place, and one senses the need for introspection and contemplation.
The audience is invited into a deeper reading of the works, even into a personal deconstruction and elaboration of one’s own social mores, anxieties, pains and desires.
Exhibition curated by Philip Larratt-Smith with Arabella Natalini e Stefania Rispoli
Words and Pictures by Elena Murratzu