The Qatar Museums Authority presents Louise Bourgeois. Conscious and Unconscious an exhibition on view 20 January, 2012 – 1 June, 2012 in the QMA Gallery, Katara.
Louise Bourgeois, Qatar Museums Authority
The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) lived almost an entire century and had the rare achievement of bridging the modern and the postmodern eras in her life and art. Conscious and Unconscious is the first in-depth survey of the work of this artist not merely in Qatar but in the Middle East. In a body of work dominated by dualities and polarities – active and passive, male and female, figurative and abstract, geometric and organic, mother and father, murder and suicide – the dynamic between conscious and unconscious is perhaps the most significant. For Bourgeois, the act of making sculpture is nothing other than finding sculptural equivalents for psychological states – of giving conscious form to her unconscious impulses, wishes, and fears. The thirty-two works in the exhibition, consisting of sculptures, installation works, gouaches, and fabric pieces, and dating from 1947 to 2009, have all been selected with a view to illuminating this underlying dynamic.
Accompanying Conscious and Unconscious is a major catalog publication featuring a foreword by Sheikha Mayassa, the title essay by the curator Philip Larratt-Smith, and a text by Sophia Al-Maria, as well as a full-colour plate section of the works in the checklist and an illustrated chronology of the artist’s life and work.
Qatar Museums Authority
Doha
Qatar
PO Box 2777
Tel: +(974) 4452 5555
www.qma.org.qa