Décontractée

1990

Throughout her career, Louise Bourgeois created biomorphic abstractions. In her work, fragmented body parts become phantom representations of her memories and experiences, and she often employed roughly finished marble blocks with exquisitely carved figurative elements growing from the stone mass. The psychological and the art historical mix seamlessly in the artist’s carvings. Here, the hard work of chiseling marble renders two recumbent hands, loosely relaxed on a monumental pedestal seemingly constructed for some more heroic purpose. Maintaining her own unheralded legacy for decades, and driven largely by an outcry by women supporters in the art world, Bourgeois had her first museum retrospective in 1982, after more than forty-five years as a practicing artist.