‘Louise Bourgeois. My Own Voice Wakes Me Up’

First solo exhibition in Hong Kong of works by renowned French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010). The exhibition is curated by Jerry Gorovoy, who worked closely with Bourgeois from the early 1980s until her death in 2010.

For more than 70 years, Bourgeois created forms that merged the concrete reality of the world around her and the fantastic reality of her inner psychic landscape. Her creative process was rooted in an existential need to record the rhythms and fluctuations of her conscious and unconscious life as a way of imposing order on the chaos of her emotions. The body, with its functions and distempers, held the key to both self-knowledge and cathartic release. ‘My Own Voice Wakes Me Up’ takes its title from one of Bourgeois’s ‘psychoanalytic writings,’ dated December 1951 and written at the very beginning of her intensive analysis. In this text, she describes how her own voice awakes her from a dream in which she was calling out (‘maman, maman’) while pounding on her husband’s chest. The exhibition focuses on distinct bodies of work from the final two decades of the artist’s life, including fabric sculptures, hand poses, late works on paper, topiary sculptures, and rarely exhibited holograms. | text Hauser & Wirth