2024-07-22 14:08:28
EThere are exhibitions in which art shows its power to such an extent that it makes you dizzy – in which the works enter into dialogue with each other and with the world in a way that shakes all the senses. “Louise Bourgeois: Unknown Memories” at the Galleria Borghese in Rome is one such exhibition. And that’s not surprising.
Because where the swelling, eerie and psychological power of the statues of this pioneer of contemporary art stop, float and lie better than in one of the most beautiful museums in the world, where they stand between Bernini “Apoll and Daphne”, Caravaggio’s “Illness of Bacchus. ” and countless other walls and masterpieces are embedded in the total art of baroque?
It is the year of Louise Bourgeois in Italy: In addition to Rome, her works can also be seen in Florence at the Museo Novecento and in Naples at the Studio Tresorio. But no place is more magical than the Galleria Borghese, which celebrates the work of this extraordinary artist in a completely new way.
Spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois in the garden of the Galleria Borghese in Rome
Quelle: ©The Easton Foundation/Authorized by SIAE 2024 and VAGA at ARS, NY/Foto A.Osio/©2024 VG Bildkunst Bonn
Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911 and died in his New York home in 2010, was the first to show how personal experience and memory can become a plastic form. Starting from her childhood, she outlines the complicated yet loving relationship with her parents and then her own role as a mother in realistic, semi-sculptures made of marble, bronze and fabric and in installations the life mechanism of birds that refers to the family and which is seen as a symbol of protection or captivity.
Metamorphosis, the growth of the inner and the changing form of the outer, in the process of becoming or decaying, is the theme of Bourgois’ life – just as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” works as life through the works in the museum: without mythology 2000 years old. verse, in which the gods become people, animals and plants, art, and even of the Baroque period, would hardly have been so dramatic and entertaining, psychologically complex and visually stimulating.
Louise Bourgeois’ first solo exhibition in Rome
Curated by art historian Cloé Perrone and founded by the Easton Foundation, which preserves the Bourgeois estate, twenty sculptures can be seen in the Galleria Borghese, in almost every room from the entrance to the garden, at the end of which one of the Famous Bourgeois, the big Bronze spiders are watching – the myth of the mother as a protection that can become a threat at any time.
It is a kind of special tribute: in a place where modern art is unforgettable, not only the first solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois in Rome takes place, but the first exhibition of a modern artist ever – one whose work equal to the greatest. The old master is the owner of nothing.
Viewing the exhibition “Unknown Memories”
Quelle: ©The Easton Foundation/Authorized by SIAE 2024 and VAGA at ARS, NY/Foto A.Osio/©2024 VG Bildkunst Bonn
In 1967, Bourgeois traveled to the Eternal City for the first time and suddenly fell in love with the Galleria Borghese, where at that time he could immerse himself in a beautiful fantasy world undisturbed by tourists. Originally planned as a summer residence in the middle of a gigantic park with a view on the hills of Rome, the collection of art in the village goes back to Cardinal Scipione Borghese: nephew and secretary of Pope Paul V, in whose side he increased the family. treasure and use the money to buy outstanding art, especially by Bernini and Caravaggio, whose work no other museum has.
The exhibition now pays particular attention to works of art in which Bourgeois worked with Carrara marble, for which he repeatedly returned to Rome. In the room of Bernini’s world-famous group sculpture “Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius” – we are drinking from “Aeneid” in which the hero leaves his family to burn Troy – a shimmering, pink, almost translucent-looking marble block of be placed in. A well-decorated front door.
Two hands that carefully touched each other came out of the stone from both sides, and were gently holding each other. A small house sits on the foreground: intimacy, love, the house as a symbol of property can almost make the gold and marble fade if the villa itself is not the perfect place to reach Bourgeois himself.
Louise Bourgeois, whose parents ran a restoration workshop for historic carpets, had a deep knowledge of art history, which she linked to her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, with whom she moved to New York in 1938. the repair, or rather the discovery, of clothes was to become an important element in his oeuvre, into which he made his commitment with an emerging philosophy and liberation.
In fact, his costume sculptures, which came from his parents’ workshop, are displayed in every exhibition: mummy heads made of artistic production, often pieces of carpet laid in position as reproductions looking blind in the Sala degli Imperatori. , among the representative marble busts and the famous Bernini, the statue of the Ascension of Proserpina is almost bursting with dynamism.
Modern art meets the old masters at Galleria Borghese
Quelle: ©The Easton Foundation/Authorized by SIAE 2024 and VAGA at ARS, NY/Foto A.Osio/©2024 VG Bildkunst Bonn
Bourgeois’s heads, on the other hand, make inner images, metaphors for the wounded soul, which appear spiritual and powerful next to the portraits of great men. And Bernini’s sculptures of bodies wrestling with each other with Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound, are suddenly viewed from the realm of the dead.
Just one sculpture by Bourgeois was enough to change the Sala Ercole: in the green, the Hall Hercules shines with Correggio’s “Danae”, two white-skinned heads look at each other on a table in a cage : Bourgeois refers to interpersonal complexity. psychodynamic relationships that open within, regardless of environment, and yet quickly blossom into the room.
The ghost train of memory
The largest and darkest installation – another of Bourgeois’s birds called “Birds” – fills a whole room on the upper floor: “Passage Dangereux” has old wooden furniture, mainly small chairs , but metal bed frames, a doll and glass. balls, which are a kind of ghost train of childhood memories.
On a bed of wire, four rough legs are tied to metal bars leading into a metal box – pointing their two toes downwards, pointing them upwards: a very rigid and yet almost childlike attitude, just as ugly as all the baroque. Shows of women are stolen, measured and raped, even if the crimes there are turned into brilliant compositions of lust and passion.
Bourgeois’ ability is to transform desires and anxieties into strange, inexplicable things that deal with the body but are not visible visually – and precisely because this causes confusion and wonder. This is also the case in the previous aviary of the Galleria Borghese: three-handed black bronzes float in the garden, whose fresco depicts large birds against a blue sky. The bronze, on the other hand, is like a mixture of the vulva, the vulva and the vampire: sexual organs, magical and disturbing at the same time.
They refer to Bourgeois’s fascination with conditions of suspension, with change and metamorphosis – with the constant ability of people to change and with their quality of always being in flux and not consistent. Existing until 1968, these works are among the most advanced examples of modern art, with Rome, which is otherwise stuck in the past, that can boast one of the best displays of summer.
One of Louise Bourgeois’ famous “Birds”.
Quelle: ©The Easton Foundation/Authorized by SIAE 2024 and VAGA at ARS, NY/Foto A.Osio/©2024 VG Bildkunst Bonn
Louise Bourgeois’ courage and innovative power, keen understanding of the dark side of the psyche, which becomes a disturbing beauty in her art, shines brighter than ever in this area. His sculptures are feminine, a strong contrast to the grand scenery of the Baroque master Bernini and all the other works in which women rarely decide what happens to them.
Presenting such an exhibition in this cultural area, just a stone’s throw from the Vatican and in a political area that wants to control the female body by others: Francesca Cappelletti, director of the Galleria Borghese from 2020, has achieved her own career. . It challenges the objective journey of the selfie with contemporary art that looks at the hidden side of humanity.
Louis Bourgeois. Unconscious Memories”Galleria Borghese, Rome, until September 15, 2024
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