louise bourgois

fabric art collages

November 2019 | I have always been an admirer of the fabric art collages of Louise Bourgeois. Here I selected a few from the work; Ode à L’Oubli, 2002. Currently to see in the exhibition: To Unravel a Torment at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands.

Fabric book Ode à l’oubli. In 2002, at the beginning of her 90th decade, Bourgeois constructed the book’s linen binding and pages out of 60-year-old, monogrammed hand towels from her 1938 wedding.Then, working from one page to the next for six months, Bourgeois cut, arranged, and stitched her own used clothing and textiles to form 32 fabric collages. Fragmented and reconfigured, these personal artifacts conspire to be remembered as forgotten.
Source: Moma.org

In the pictures you can see the buttonholes with which the fabric collages are tied together.

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (25 December 1911 | 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a theraputic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Source: Wikipedia

Portrait: Alex van Gelder. (Check out his other beautiful portraits of Louise Bourgeois.)
Louise Bourgeois. Ode à l’oubli. 2002. Fabric illustrated book with 35 compositions: 32 fabric collages, 2 with ink additions, and 3 lithographs (including cover), page (each approx.): 11 3/4 x 13” (29.8 x 33 cm); overall: 11 x 12 3/16 x 1 ¾” (28 x 31 x 4.5cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust
Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, no. 22 of 34, from the fabric illustrated book, Ode à l’oubli. 2002. Fabric collage, page: 11 3/4 x 13” (29.8 x 33 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust
Back to Top