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I recently visited the unique, spiral Guggenheim museum where I saw several work done by many artists. At the time, most of the work on display was done by an artist named Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois has been labeled a Primitivist, a Surrealist, a Conceptual artist, an Installation artist, a Feminist icon, a Minimalist, an artist in general and a sculptor. For the most part, she is categorized as Contemporary art. She is one of the best known and living woman artists today. Bourgeois was born on December 25th, 1911 in Paris. She trained in France before settling in New York when she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938. Her early studies of geometry contributed to her early cubist drawings. Due to her up-bringing, it played a huge role in her work. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them in symbolic terms with the main focus being "relationships".
She first worked with wood constructions painted black or white and then worked in different materials such as stone, metal or latex. She became one of the leading American contemporary sculptors and if her work is abstract, it is often of the human figure. In contrast, the piece I liked the most was not of an actual human figure.
Although there were many pieces of work by Bourgeois that I liked, the one that I was mostly drawn to was a piece called The Confrontation. Bourgeois likes both installation and performance art both of which The Confrontation portrays. The Confrontation was first shown at the Hamilton Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1978. It was shown as an installation but was also a stage for a fashion show which she choreographed and directed.
Confrontation was an early manifestation of the encasing cell structure that would be fundamental to Bourgeois's later installations of the 1990s. The work addresses issues of vulnerability, exposure, and the need for people to confront themselves. Bourgeois says it is called The...