CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/24/2022

'Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child' is NEW from Hatje Cantz

“Eugénie Gradet” (2009) is reproduced from Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, the highly anticipated catalog to the exhibition currently on view at the Hayward Gallery, London. A comprehensive overview of the artist’s late textile works, this volume digs deep. “Sewing, for Bourgeois, goes beyond restoration on a material level,” Julienne Lorz writes. “Instead, it is a metaphor for psychological repair and for exploring the complexity of human relationships. In her artworks, ‘repairs’ remain visible, becoming conspicuous scars. Sewing becomes a subtle form of communication and an attempt at atonement, where the gesture and labor involved can evoke complex feelings—among them guilt and gratitude—in another person. For Bourgeois, the act of reparation was a defense against fragmentation and disintegration, and sewing a way to ward off feelings of abandonment or separation—an attempt to keep things whole.”