Discover Louise Bourgeois’s paintings as part of the Belvedere’s three-hundred-year jubilee. The Belvedere dedicates a major solo exhibition to an artist who, like virtually no other, has shaped the art of today.
Presented in the Baroque galleries of the Lower Belvedere, Louise Bourgeois’s paintings from the 1940s are placed in dialogue with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from all periods of her storied career.
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1947
Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023
Collection Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993
Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023
In an oeuvre which covered a wide range of formal and material experimentation, Bourgeois succeeded in expressing contradictory impulses and binary oppositions—figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious—within a single work. By the 1990s, she had won global renown for her artistic achievements, becoming famous for her monumental spider sculptures and room-sized Cells. But it was in her oil paintings made between 1938 and 1949 that the French-American artist first developed the formal vocabulary and defined the thematic concerns that she would continue to explore over the following seven decades.
The exhibition represents the first time these paintings will be exhibited as a body of work in Europe, and it is the first major exhibition of Bourgeois’s work in Vienna in a generation. It is open until January 28 2024.
Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1946-1947
Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023
Header: Installation view Louise Bourgeois. Persistent Antagonism, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, 2023. Photo: Johannes Stoll, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023
