With this exhibition curated by Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), the Kunstmuseum Basel offers an unprecedented encounter between two giants of American art. The psychologically charged work of Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) deals with the realm of human emotion: love, desire, dependency, sexuality, rejection, jealousy, and abandonment. Holzer is internationally renowned for her exploration and subversion of public language through the use of nontraditional forms, from street signs and T-shirts to projections and LEDs.
Holzer approaches Bourgeois’s art through the lens of her extensive writing: Bourgeois’s vast archive ranges from decades of diaries and letters to several hundred psychoanalytic writings, and she frequently incorporated the written word into her art. Works from all stages of Bourgeois’s oeuvre — sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, prints, and texts — have been selected to create a series of thematic groupings in the galleries of the Neubau.
