Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents “Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape,” an exhibition exploring the dynamic relationship between landscape and the human body in the late artist’s work. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, this marks Bourgeois’s second show at the gallery’s Hong Kong location.
The exhibition features a selection of works spanning from the 1960s until Bourgeois’s death in 2010. It sets up five interlocking dialogues revolving around an iconography of nests, holes, cavities, mounds, breasts, spirals, snakes, and water. These images correspond to themes Bourgeois explored throughout her career, including motherhood, fecundity, protection, vulnerability, and the passage of time.
Bourgeois’s diverse material palette includes bronze, rubber, lead, aluminum, wood, and marble. The exhibition highlights certain formal devices developed by the artist, such as hanging forms, spirals, and reliefs. As is characteristic of Bourgeois’s work, the pieces oscillate between abstraction and figuration.
The show includes works from Bourgeois’s Lair series, created in the early 1960s as she emerged from a period of depression and psychoanalysis. These sculptures represent protective retreats, conveying a sense of interiority and withdrawal.
Making its Asian debut is “Spider” (2000), a sculpture inspired by an ostrich egg. The piece expresses the burdensome responsibilities of motherhood, with Bourgeois’s iconic spiders serving as both an ode to her mother and a self-portrait.
Several previously unexhibited works are on display, including four wall reliefs of painted wood that merge landscape and biomorphic forms. These reliefs, fashioned from old crates once used to transport Bourgeois’s Personage sculptures, are complemented by a horizontal scratchboard landscape portraying isolation.
Another first-time exhibit is the bronze fountain “Mamelles” (1991 [cast 2005]), featuring multiple breast-like forms with water spilling from the nipples. This piece symbolizes both the passage of time and maternal nourishment.
The exhibition also includes late works on paper and a series of double-sided drawings titled “Time” (2004), which showcase Bourgeois’s meditative mark-making and diaristic quality.
Louise Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911 and deceased in New York in 2010, was one of the most influential artists of the past century. Her work, spanning various mediums but primarily focused on sculpture, expressed a range of emotions through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents. Bourgeois’s art often dealt with themes of family relationships, guilt, jealousy, betrayal, and abandonment, countered with love and reparation.
The exhibition “Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape” opens on March 25 and runs through June 21, 2025, at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong. It coincides with a major survey exhibition tour organized by the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which will be on view at the Fubon Art Museum, Taipei, from March 15 to June 30, 2025.
