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Art Art & Books

Bourgeois continuity

LOUISE BOURGEOIS at MOCCA ( Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, 952 Queen West), to August 11. 416-395-0067. Rating: NNNN


If the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010 at 98, still look startlingly contemporary, maybe it’s because as a woman artist and a French expatriate in New York, she remained an outsider. She doggedly pursued her own artistic obsessions with psychological trauma and gender, unconnected to established art movements and exhibiting only sporadically until her 70s.

Both early and late works at MOCCA testify to the continuity of her oeuvre.

The Personnages, wooden uprights that resemble primitive, abstract ceremonial staffs, were Bourgeois’s first mature artworks, begun in the 1940s after her move to New York. Made to represent people she’d left behind in war-torn Europe, they’re displayed as she intended, in small groupings that highlight relationships.

Their unstable pointed shapes imbue them with a poetic sense of human fragility, and they contain a vocabulary of references that she drew on throughout her career: needles (her family ran a tapestry restoration workshop), knives, architecture (especially skyscrapers), sexual organs.

Sculpture made in the 00s using very different materials – sweaters bunched or stretched on sticks, then cast in bronze – channel the anthropomorphic pathos of the Personnages, the garments’ openings and pouches evoking bodily orifices and protrusions.

The recognition she received in the 80s, after being championed by feminists and getting a retrospective at MoMA (its first for a woman), allowed her to take on more ambitious projects. Cell (The Last Climb) was the final instalment in a series of cage-like rooms called Cells. Viewed voyeur-style from the outside, the installations sometimes contained clothing and furniture as well as sculptural forms.

In this one – with blue glass spheres held on metal arms and spools of thread that runs to needles in a hanging blue sack – a central spiral staircase leads to a rooftop opening where some glass balls have escaped. It’s a valedictory statement that, compared to other Cells, is more transcendent than eerie.

In our mediated world, Bourgeois’s sometimes disturbing, sometimes playful insights still seem remarkably fresh.

art@nowtoronto.com

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