Belvedere in Vienna mounts major Louise Bourgeois painting retrospective

The Belvedere in Vienna, one of the world's first public museums and Austria's first contemporary art institution, is celebrating its tercentenary with a major retrospective dedicated to Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911 – New York, 2010). The exhibition, titled "Louise Bourgeois. Persistent Antagonism," is curated by Sabine Fellner and Johanna Hofer and will be held in the Baroque galleries of the Lower Belvedere. It brings together all paintings created by the artist in the 1940s, juxtaposed with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from her prolific career. Although Bourgeois is widely known for her monumental sculptures—gaining fame in the 1990s with her spiders and Cells, showcased at international events like documenta in Kassel (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1993)—it is in her oil paintings, dating from 1938 to 1949, that she first developed the formal language that would characterize her expressive work for decades. In these early works, she gave form to the torments of her childhood, exorcising them through art. Emotions such as love, fear, guilt, abandonment, and reconciliation move from the intimate and personal sphere to the universal, represented through contrasts and incessant formal and material experimentation.