Louise Bourgeois: Fabric into Art

Untitled, 2005, fabric, 16 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches.

One of the most beautiful, lyrical, and surprising shows I've seen recently is Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works at Cheim & Read Gallery, up until June 25th. Towards the end of her life, Bourgeois focused on these intimate pieces, using cloth from her closets, so they are worn and personal and a part of her life. She cut and sewed pieces of ordinary fabric into complex patterns...

Untitled, 2005, fabric, 18 1/8 x 14 1/8 inches.

or large simple shapes, bringing to my mind abstract painting of a minimalist sensibility, or even Blinky Palermo's large fabric paintings. As I was looking at the work, and feeling so touched by it, I tried to understand what made the use of fabric so different from paint. For me it is the vulnerability of fabric, its fragility that lends a special poignancy to the work. Paint is so robust in comparison. And even though a painting and one of these fabric works are both handmade, there is a metaphor in the careful stitching of piece to piece not present in paint on a surface.

Eugenie Grandet, 2009, mixed media on cloth, 2 of a suite of 16, 11 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches each.

In the small room near the gallery's entrance a suite of inventive fabric pieces represent the Balzac novel Eugenie Grandet. On what looks to me like a linen ground are artificial flowers, buttons, hooks, carefully assembled on the surface, alluding to accumulation and loss.

The Waiting Hours, 2007, fabric, suite of 12, 15 1/8 x 12 1/4 inches each.

from The Waiting Hours

The Waiting Hours shows a landscape of sea and sky gradually changing, moving from calm to turbulent, day to night. In the first piece of the suite, above, I love the varied types of cloth––flat, shiny, textured––that add richness to the simple structure.

Dawn, 2006, 3 of 12 pages of a fabric book, 12 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches each.

These are three images from a book, whose theme is circles: mostly concentric, but also receding and random. Bourgeois is so clever in her use of pattern either found or sewn.

Untitled, 2005, fabric, 20 1/2 x 27 inches.

detail of Untitled, 2005

I love the stripes of different colors and materials against the pink rectangle made of a silky looking fabric with subtle vertical striations. The bold stripes next to it are of a worn jersey fabric, soft next to the crisp silk. In the photo you can also see reflections, of me and of the works hanging across the room. I decided to use my own photos for this post rather than the gallery images (all the works can be seen at the link above) because they feel more present, more visceral to me.

Untitled, 2006, fabric and fabric collage, 11 x 18 1/4 x 2 inches.

detail of Untitled, 2006

I especially love this piece in which the quiet of an Asian-looking circle is paired with a bulbous accumulation of soft transparent forms: the body with the mind, or messy rich confusion with perfect clarity. As a painter who also works with textiles, I found this show inspiring, prodding me to think about the meaning of materials themselves.