Louise Bourgeois December 25, 1911 – May 31, 2010

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.

One of the world’s most respected artists by the time of her death, Bourgeois had an exceptionally broad career that was notable for its slow beginnings. Born in Paris to French tapestry restorers in 1911, she worked as an assistant for the artist Fernand Leger before moving to New York in 1938. She did not have her first solo exhibition until June 1945, when she was shown at New York's Bertha Schaeder Gallery, three months before the end of World War II. After experimenting with painting early on, Bourgeois devoted herself to sculpture in 1949, though she occasionally also produced prints and drawings. Of her decision to abandon painting for sculpture, she told the critic Amei Wallach, “When you go from painting to this, it means you have an aggressive thought. You want to twist the neck of a person. I became a sculptor because it allowed me to express … what I was embarrassed to express before.”

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TIM HAWKINSON @ Blum and Poe now through 6.26.10

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce their first solo exhibition of new work by Tim Hawkinson.

Tim Hawkinson’s practice is known for its sprawling surrealistic self-portraiture in which the body, through intense introspection, becomes an alien landscape open to radical redefinition and transformation. This artistic agenda is mirrored materially by Hawkinson’s use of familiar and ubiquitous consumer packaging and household objects in highly unconventional ways. The new work continues these refrains, while also exploring more pointedly temporality, mortality, and the cyclic.

Hawkinson works in a range of media, involving sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. The exhibition will present this wide array, including such pieces as, Orrery, a towering eight foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform that is itself made up of a series of rotating concentric circles depicting tire treads. This piece references the mechanical models and devices used to illustrate the motions of the planets and their moons in our solar system. A sculptural collage of water bottles, plastic shopping bags, recouped ordinary hardware, and odds and ends; every part of this piece is interconnected and eternally spinning, from her head, hands, eyes, and ears, to the optical pattern on her dress, which is a motion illusion called “Rotating Snakes” designed by Japanese Psychology Professor Kitaoka Akiyoshi. With wheels upon wheels, this hyperkinetic sculpture resembles a Whirling Dervish, a hypnotic mystical dancer forever cycling between the material and cosmic worlds.

A sympathetic sculpture, also approaching eight feet tall, is a giant foam candle. This dramatic increase in scale turns a once knowable and homey object into a caustic, volcanic landscape. A central wick appears to erupt in flames, sending a cascade of casts of Hawkinson’s heels and toes pouring down the side like a revolving wax waterfall. A small door on its side reveals a chamber lined with a golden emergency blanket that bathes the piece’s handcrafted motor in an orange glow, altogether evoking Earth’s fiery recycling processes. The burning candle also references vanitas paintings and their reflection on mortality.

In another piece, Hawkinson takes large self-portrait photos printed in the negative and collages them together to resemble a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Suspended on an empty backdrop, Hawkinson reconfigures his body so that arms become handles, legs the spokes, and fingers multiplied and braided together to become tires. Eerie structural correspondences and analogous traits between the body’s composition, its locomotion, its internal cycles, and mass-produced two-wheeled motor vehicles give way to a sense of the “self” as “other”, a subject that is explored throughout Hawkinson’s practice.

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