Louise Bourgeois
Aller – Retour

The French title of the exhibition, Aller – Retour [Round Trip], refers to Louise Bourgeois' French origins (b. 1911, Paris – d. 2010, New York City), but also to her artistic practice, an uninterrupted search for identity and a return to the psychological conflicts of her childhood and youth, especially her problematic relationship with her father. The present is connected to the past – the metaphor of weaving and the image of the mesh – Bourgeois' father's business restored tapestries – symbolise the work of memory and the processing of psychological crises.

Kunsthalle Wien shows the artist's later works as a dialogue between sculpture and drawing. Some 150 works were shown in six rooms thematically based around central sculptures and themes such as rivers, spiders and proverbs / aperçus. One room offered a retrospective of older works by the artist. The focus of the show however lied on the oeuvre of the last ten years, the majority of which are diary-like drawings, in which text and symbols frequently mingle.

Long denied due recognition, Louise Bourgeois became an 'avant-garde superstar' and is today considered a 'great figure of the post-modern' (Peter Weiermair), even though fame did not reach the artist until the second half of her life. Since the 1980s, the works of Louise Bourgeois have followed the prevalent notion of art that rejects universal style and formal understanding in favour of a personal approach. The artist's central concern lied in overcoming conflicts and the establishment of an intense, open discussion on the dialectics of thoughts and feelings.