Book Launch for Louise Bourgeois: ‘The Insomnia Drawings’ & ‘Knife-Woman’

On the occasion of the opening weekend of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois. Gathering Wool,’ please join us in the bookshop at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street to celebrate two book releases for the artist, the reissue of ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings’ from Hauser & Wirth Publishers and the new English translation of ‘Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois’ by Marie-Laure Bernadac from Yale University Press. 

Insomnia was a lifelong companion of Louise Bourgeois’s nights. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she committed to paper the thoughts, memories, and images that surfaced during these sleepless hours. The resultant 220 drawings represent the quintessence of the impulses, sources, and motifs that inspired Bourgeois’s work. Originally published in 2001 by Daros and Scalo, the two-volume set of ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings’ is newly available courtesy of The Easton Foundation and Hauser & Wirth Publishers. 

Marie-Laure Bernadac’s biography ‘Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois’ traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman’s life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist’s unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. 

Copies of ‘The Insomnia Drawings’ and ‘Knife-Woman’ will be available for purchase, and Marie-Laure Bernadac will briefly introduce her biography of Louise Bourgeois before signing books.

This event is free; however, reservations are recommended.

Screening Room: Preceding the book launch, at 3 pm in the amphitheater at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street, we will host the US Premiere of Marie-Ève de Grave’s new documentary, ‘Louise Bourgeois. The Rage to Understand.’

For more information about the film and to reserve your spot, click here.

About Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911 and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of our time. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

About ‘Louise Bourgeois. Gathering Wool’

Over the course of her seven-decade career, Louise Bourgeois never privileged figuration over abstraction, any more than she favored one material over another, and yet her relationship to abstraction has been less well defined and understood, less easily situated within the main currents of postwar art.  

‘Gathering Wool’ explores the artist‘s complex relationship to abstraction through a series of late sculptures, reliefs and works on paper, many of which have never been exhibited before. These will be installed alongside a selection of earlier works to illuminate the consistency of Bourgeois’s themes and her development of a symbolic abstract language.

The exhibition takes its title from an enigmatic work Bourgeois created in 1990. Gathering wool is an expression signifying rumination, daydreaming, letting the mind wander—a break from conscious, purposive thinking. This was the mental state in which Bourgeois worked as she experimented with forms and processes in her studio. She trusted the process by which these thought traces, fragments of dreams, idle speculations, hunches, fancies and intuitions coalesced into a form, but it remained mysterious even to her.

About Marie-Laure Bernadac

Marie-Laure Bernadac is a former curator at the Louvre, Musée Picasso, Centre Pompidou, and the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and a leading specialist on Louise Bourgeois. Lauren Elkin is an award-winning writer and translator. Her books include Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.

About Hauser & Wirth Publishers

In keeping with Hauser & Wirth’s artist-centric vision, Hauser & Wirth Publishers works to bring readers into the universe of artists and behind the scenes of their practices. From publishing artists’ writings and exceptional exhibition-related books to commissioning new scholarship and pursuing the highest levels of craft in design and bookmaking, Hauser & Wirth Publishers creates vital, lasting records of artists’ work and ideas, forging critical gateways to the cultural discourse they inspire.

Publishing has been a cornerstone of Hauser & Wirth’s activity since the gallery’s founding in 1992. Its publishing activities steadily flourished through partnerships with imprints such as Hatje Cantz, JRP|Ringier, Snoeck, Steidl, Thames & Hudson, and Yale University Press before the establishment of Hauser & Wirth Publishers, with headquarters in New York and Zurich.

Hauser & Wirth Publishers titles are available worldwide in all our gallery locations as well as in museum stores, independent bookshops, and online. Our books are distributed via Distributed Art Publishers, Thames & Hudson, and Interart.

About Yale University Press

By publishing serious works that contribute to a global understanding of human affairs, Yale University Press aids in the discovery and dissemination of light and truth, lux et veritas, which is a central purpose of Yale University. The publications of the Press are books and other materials that further scholarly investigation, advance interdisciplinary inquiry, stimulate public debate, educate both within and outside the classroom, and enhance cultural life. In its commitment to increasing the range and vigor of intellectual pursuits within the university and elsewhere, Yale University Press continually extends its horizons to embody university publishing at its best.

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