For the first time ever, New Zealand is hosting a solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The landmark exhibition, titled "Louise Bourgeois: In Private View," opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and offers visitors an intimate look into the extraordinary life and career of this iconic contemporary art figure. The exhibition will remain open and free to the public until May 2026.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are immediately greeted by a large, sketchy purple spiral painted on a fleshy pink wall, with the exhibition title overlaid in vinyl lettering. A short, dark passageway leads to a striking wall-to-wall black-and-white photograph showing Louise Bourgeois in her later years, laughing as she is embraced - or perhaps entrapped - by the spiky legs of one of her supersized spider sculptures.
The exhibition chronicles the full scope of Bourgeois' long career and life, marking important turning points from her first painting show in New York in 1945 to a fabric work created in 2010, the final year of her life. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up helping her parents restore and mend tapestries. After her mother's death in 1932, she abandoned her mathematics studies to pursue art, studying at various French institutions and apprenticing under master artists.
Bourgeois' life changed dramatically when she met Robert Goldwater, a renowned American art historian, in 1936. They fell in love, married in 1938, and moved to New York, where she would spend the rest of her career. While her solo exhibitions began with paintings, it was in sculpture that her work truly found its voice and established her reputation.
"It is hard to describe Louise Bourgeois' work and impact without falling into superlatives," notes the significance of her contribution to art history. At art schools, books featuring her work are so sought after they require special protection. Bourgeois cannot be defined by any single movement, despite coming into contact with surrealism, abstract expressionism, modernism, eccentric abstraction, postmodernism, and the feminist art movement.
"She would duck and cover from almost every grouping that she was associated with," explains Natasha Conland, senior curator of global contemporary art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. "She could have at almost any point joined a movement and become its star - but she didn't. She sets herself apart, and she really uses her voice to find herself."
The first works visitors encounter in "In Private View" are the Personages from the late 1940s, which represent the genesis of her sculpture practice. These pole-like figures serve as minimalist representations of the people she left behind in France. While elegant in their simplicity, the most striking piece features a cluster of heavy nails rammed into where the mouth would be. These sculptures were created on the roof of her New York home, while downstairs she managed the demands of mothering three sons.
The death of Bourgeois' father in 1951 marked the end of this era and leads visitors into the exhibition's second room. For 11 years following this loss, Bourgeois stopped showing work, disappeared from public view, and underwent psychoanalysis. The second room displays the visceral, symbolic, enigmatic, and powerfully human work that emerged after this transformative period.
This section showcases the materials, textures, and motifs for which Bourgeois is most famous. While a spider sculpture is present, it represents just a small part of her extensive body of work. More captivating is "Lair" (1962), a white, messy sculpture roughly the size of a wedding cake. The spiral construction bears the marks of her hands and fingers as it spirals unevenly upward.
"A spiral represents somewhere that you might get stuck, but it can also be a safe place," Conland explains. "It's somewhere you can retreat to, but it also makes you vulnerable." Spirals appear repeatedly throughout Bourgeois' work, with one artwork label describing how the form reminded her of washing tapestries in the river as a child, twisting the material to wring out water, and in daydreams, wringing the neck of her father's mistress.
Bourgeois remained tight-lipped about her personal life until age 71, when everything came pouring out during an autobiographical presentation that accompanied her first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. She revealed that for 10 years, her dominating father had carried out an affair with the English tutor who lived in their house. At the end of the exhibition's second room, Bourgeois' gravelly voice rings out, telling this story which is understood as the origin story for her art.
"I wanted to bring that story in," says Conland, "because for her, that psychological point is so dramatic in her own story about her work." The 1982 slideshow of family photos is projected into a nook between the second and third rooms. "I have tried to bring in quite a bit of her and even her voice into the exhibition," Conland adds.
Conland spent years negotiating the loan of works and building this exhibition, a project that began around the time the Art Gallery of New South Wales hosted what she describes as a "very dramatic and almost bombastic Bourgeois exhibition" - the kind she categorizes as a "blockbuster." "In Private View" takes a decidedly different approach, offering a contemplative and intimate look at Bourgeois rather than focusing solely on high drama.
All works except one have been loaned anonymously from a private collection. They are domestic or human in scale, lending an intimacy to the experience of being in the room with them. "They're also more representative of Bourgeois' practice - for much of her life, it was really making in her home and in relation to her family life," Conland explains.
The third and final room of "In Private View" is especially contemplative. "The Couple," a shiny aluminum sculpture from 2003, hangs from the ceiling with two figures almost enmeshed and balancing each other. Two large, dark copper eyes observe visitors from the floor, scratched drawings oscillate on the walls, and in the pink sculpture "Mamelles" (1991), breasts or udders are jammed into a crevice.
For Conland, assembling this exhibition has been "a complete joy - there's nothing like working with the art to make you think uniquely, or have thoughts you wouldn't get just from reading about someone's work." After spending three years on the show, with the final year completely engrossed in the project, she has clearly built a relationship with the works.
The gallery is planning special programming around the exhibition, including an immersive evening on October 16th featuring live music, DJ sets, and workshops exploring Bourgeois' surreal world as part of the gallery's biggest Open Late event of the year. The gallery shop offers a special array of handmade items and books for visitors who want to take a piece of Bourgeois' world home with them.
"Louise Bourgeois: In Private View" is designed to be an exhibition that rewards multiple visits. Beyond the many individual works, there are subtle connections happening between them - chairs that appear and reappear, spirals reimagined in new forms, the imprint of Bourgeois' hands, her stitches, the shadows of threads, and the taut lines of drawings. One visitor, returning alone a few days later, found herself laughing at an object label quote from Bourgeois about "Mamelles" - that pink landscape of breasts represents "a man who lives off the women he courts, making his way from one to the next. Feeding from them but returning nothing, he loves only in a consumptive sense." Here is Bourgeois, as unapologetic, iconic, and relevant as ever.
