Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

Louise Bourgeois (born 1911 in Paris; died 2010 in New York) is one of the most important artists of the last century. During a career that spanned 70 years, and in a wide variety of media – including installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting – she explored the tensions within binary oppositions through unrivaled formal invention. Polarities such as male and female, passive and active, figuration and abstraction, conscious and unconscious, and others, often coexist within the same work.

Bourgeois’s art was inspired in part by the complex and at times traumatic events of her early childhood. The act of restaging her memories and emotions allowed her to sublimate them into universal motifs and to express contradictory emotional and psychological states: hope and fear, anxiety and calm, guilt and reparation, tension and release. Performances and sculptures that foreground sexuality, gender, and the lived body were highly acclaimed particularly within a feminist context.

Bourgeois’s art has had a profound influence on many artists and continues to be exhibited at major museums around the world. This exhibition, Bourgeois’s first in Japan in 27 years and her largest solo exhibition in the country to date, will showcase more than 100 works across three chapters that offer a comprehensive overview of her practice.

The subtitle of the exhibition, I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. is taken from a late fabric work in which Bourgeois embroidered these words on a handkerchief. It alludes to the fluctuations and ambivalent character of her emotions, and hints at her black sense of humor. Bourgeois saw herself as a survivor. Her work expresses her strong will to live and the promise of overcoming the sometimes “hellish” suffering of mankind, which is all too often exacerbated by war, natural disaster, and disease.

 Click here to see installation view 

Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

Exhibition Period: Wednesday, September 25, 2024 – Sunday, January 19, 2025

Organizers	Mori Art Museum The Yomiuri Shimbun NHK
Corporate Sponsors	GUERLAIN KAJIMA CORPORATION OBAYASHI CORPORATION TAKENAKA CORPORATION TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION SANKI ENGINEERING CO., LTD.
Special Support	The Easton Foundation
Support	ALL NIPPON AIRWAYS CO., LTD.
Curated by	Tsubaki Reiko (Curator, Mori Art Museum), Yahagi Manabu (Associate Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Advising Curator	Philip Larratt-Smith (Curator, The Easton Foundation) * The exhibition is organized by the Mori Art Museum in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, New York, based partly on the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?, organized by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and curated by Justin Paton (Head Curator of International Art) and Emily Sullivan (Assistant Curator of Contemporary International Art). This exhibition is covered by the Japanese Act on the Indemnification of Damage to Works of Art in Exhibitions (Act No.17 of 2011)