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

Bourgeois suffered from a lifelong fear of abandonment. The first chapter of the exhibition, “Do Not Abandon Me,” traces this fear back to the original separation from the mother. Bourgeois explored the theme of motherhood in all its ambivalence and complexity, as demonstrated in her sculpture Nature Study. She believed that the mother-child relationship set the template for all future relationships.
Bourgeois once said that her sculpture was her body, and her body was her sculpture. Images of bodily fragments often appear in her work as symbols and symptoms of psychic instability and disintegration.

The works in the second chapter, “I Have Been to Hell and Back,” bear witness to a host of conflictual and negative emotions: anxiety, guilt, jealousy, suicidal impulses, murderous hostility, fear of intimacy and dependency, and fear of rejection. The fabric bust Rejection is such an example.
Bourgeois believed that making sculpture was a form of exorcism - a way of discharging unwelcome or unmanageable emotions. Working against the resistance of the material provided her with an outlet for her aggression.
Through her analysis, Bourgeois came to understand that much of her work was generated as a negative reaction against her father. In 1974, Bourgeois created the installation The Destruction of the Father, which stages a fantasy of cannibalistic revenge against a domineering father figure. This seminal piece represents the culmination, and in many ways the synthesis, of the forms and materials she had explored throughout the 1960s and early 1970s – from undulating abstract landscapes to more sexually explicit body parts.

Bourgeois saw herself as a survivor, and her art as the instrument that enabled her survival, like a crutch or prosthesis. The final chapter of the exhibition, “Repairs in the Sky,” shows how her art enabled her to bring conscious and unconscious, maternal and paternal, past and present into a precarious balance. Topiary IV and Clouds and Caverns beautifully exemplify such restorative and regenerative forces. As Bourgeois famously stated, “art is a guaranty of sanity.”
Bourgeois believed that the artist enjoyed unusually direct access to the unconscious and possessed the gift of sublimation – that is, the ability to channel sexual and aggressive drives and impulses toward artistic ends. Her sculptures and other works are symbolic representations of psychological states, and constitute an attempt to impose order on the chaos of her emotions.
By using clothing and other fabrics from her life, Bourgeois acted out the wish to hold on to the past and give it permanent form in her art. Sewing and joining were symbolic actions that ward off the fear of separation and abandonment. They also evince an unconscious identification with her mother, who ran the family’s tapestry restoration workshop in the Parisian suburbs.