Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

Bourgeois’s largest ever solo exhibition in Japan and her first in 27 years
More than half of the works are being shown in Japan for the first time

This is Bourgeois’s first solo exhibition in Japan since 1997, and will showcase approximately 100 works, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, fabric works, and installations.
Bourgeois continued to create artworks until her death at the age of 98, and during her final years produced many works that might be considered some of the most iconic of her career. About half of the works in this exhibition, such as her fabric works, were created after 1998, and will be on view for the first time in Japan.

Three chapters explore the theme of family relationships

The exhibition consists of three chapters based on Bourgeois’s relationship with her family, a prime source of her inspiration. Chapter 1, “Do Not Abandon Me,” is about her relationship with her mother; Chapter 2, “I Have Been to Hell and Back,” is based on the negative emotions towards her father; and Chapter 3, “Repairs in the Sky,” is about the restoration of family relationships and emotional liberation.
In addition, two smaller spaces between the chapters, are dedicated to a chronological presentation of earlier works: Bourgeois’s paintings (1938-1948) and “Personage” series sculptures (1946-1949), whose subjects straddle her childhood and youth in France and her adult life in New York; and her more abstract sculptures from the 1960s, which were created in the wake of her intensive immersion in psychoanalysis over the course of the previous decade.
Bourgeois was also a gifted writer. She left a vast archive of diaries and letters, as well as hundreds of texts, now known as the psychoanalytic writings, made during her time in analysis. These revelatory writings mine complex emotional and psychological states: Anxiety, anger, jealousy, murderous hostility, guilt, compassion, gratitude, and love. Excerpts from Bourgeois’s writings in various formats will complement her artworks throughout the galleries.

Display of early paintings that are attracting global attention

The exhibition will feature a selection of paintings Bourgeois made during the first 10 years since she moved to New York City in 1938. This important body of work has been reevaluated in recent years with focused exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2022) and Galerie Belvedere (Vienna, 2023-2024). Around ten of these paintings will be on view in Asia for the first time.
In 1938, Bourgeois married American art historian Robert Goldwater in Paris and moved to New York. The paintings she produced in these early years established many of the motifs that she would go on to explore over the next six decades: self-portraits, houses, references to France and family left behind, an iconography of plants, and nature, various architectural forms and the “Femme Maison” series, in which the top half of a woman is obscured by a house which both imprisons and protects her. These last paintings were championed by the feminist movement in the 1960s, and are among the most iconic of her oeuvre.

Introduction of the works featuring spiders and the public artwork Maman, the symbol of Roppongi Hills

From a small 1947 drawing to the much later, and larger, sculptures in bronze, the spider has repeatedly appeared as an iconic motif in Bourgeois’s art. For her, the spider was symbolic of her mother, a weaver who oversaw the family tapestry workshop and a calm, diligent force whom Bourgeois characterized as her ‘best friend.’ The complexity of motherhood is conveyed through a spider that is both a repairer, healing wounds with its threads, and a menacing predator. It is also a self-portrait: the spider produces its web from its body, much as Bourgeois made art in relationship to her body and as a reaction to her inner anxieties and emotions.

Presentation of Jenny Holzer video installation using Louise Bourgeois’s words

Holzer (born 1950 in Ohio, USA), internationally known for her conceptual artworks that feature words and phrases, developed a friendship with Bourgeois in the late 1990s. Inspired by her strong interest in Bourgeois’s diaries, letters, and writings, Holzer curated a solo exhibition of Bourgeois’s work, much of which had textual elements, at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2022. She also projected excerpts from Bourgeois’s writings on the facades of buildings scattered throughout the city of Basel. For this exhibition, a similar presentation of Bourgeois’s words, selected by Holzer, will be projected.
In addition, footage of Bourgeois’s seminal performance, A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts, which took place inside her gallery-sized installation, Confrontation, in 1978, features the underground artist Suzan Cooper (1952-2023), and will also be shown in this exhibition.

History of Bourgeois’s practice, and display of archival materials

A chronology of Bourgeois’s 98-year life and various activities as an artist will be presented along with a selection of archival materials. The exhibition will include selected diary excerpts (including from a diary she kept as an eleven-year-old girl), facsimiles of her psychoanalytic writings, ephemera and exhibition announcements, and a documentary film about the artist.