Don’t abandon me, “Do Not Abandon Me”. The cry of the child looking for his mother. Or the now old woman who sees her son moving away from her, to remain alone in her fragility. Motherhood, in all its meanings, is one of the most powerful engines that moves art Louise Bourgeois (Paris 1911-New York 2010), and a seventy-year career has made her one of the absolute protagonists of the 20th and 21st century. How hypnotic it still is to investigate her psyche and unconscious, to try to express the unspeakable and the repressed, is demonstrated by the four exhibitions that open almost simultaneously in Italy between Florence, Rome and Naples.
Sabato (22 June) is the Tuscan capital which in two different locations, Museo Novecento and Istituto degli Innocenti, tells through more than one hundred works in marble, bronze, fabric, drawings, gouaches and other materials, always on the ridge between figurative and abstract, his research and his attempt to exorcise pain and trauma, anxieties and real fears. Do Not Abandon Me is the exhibition that occupies almost the entirety of the Museo Novecento, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith and Sergio Risaliti in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, where a review of red gouaches by Louise Bourgeois, red as blood, point precisely to the mother-child dyad, Bourgeois’s model of all future human relationships.
A title that explicitly refers to the abandonment that the artist herself experienced as a child in Paris, where her parents ran a tapestry restoration workshop. His childhood is marked by a complicated relationship with his family, and his traumatic experiences become one of his main sources of inspiration: “I work with all my failures. When I talk about the trauma of abandonment, I know what I’m talking about”, he said .
It was from this vulnus that in the mid-1990s he began working on his most iconic image, the spider. In the Renaissance cloister of the Museo Novecento looms Spider Couple, the only sculpture by Bourgeois inspired by the spider that depicts a couple: a husband and a wife? A father and a mother, or a mother and a son? And Spider, a sculpture made up of a bronze spider and a marble egg, never exhibited before. Symbol of the maternal figure, the spider is in fact the bearer of dual and contrasting meanings: the embodiment of extreme intelligence, a protective figure who provides for her young by building a house and ensuring food; but also a threatening and disturbing presence, an expression of hostility, so much so that Louise said: “In real life I identify with the victim, in my art I am the murderer”.
Of particular impact is the series of sixteen digital prints on fabric Do Not Abandon Me (2009-10), born from the collaboration with the British artist Tracey Emin (Margate, 1963), from which the exhibition takes its title. It is a project that testifies to the profound empathy between the two artists as well as the communicative strength that they both employ in their work. Peaux de lapins, chiffons ferrailles à vendre, also exhibited on the ground floor, is one of the latest works in the Cells series, a word that plays on its multiple meanings, cell or cell, referring to all living organisms, but also to isolation. Inside the cell Bourgeois inserts sculptural elements that recall his personal and family history, such as the fur collar, the bags of flesh-colored fabric and the rabbit skins: elements referable to the female genitals and the empty belly, as well as, more literally , to the animals hunted and raised by his family members.
The Istituto degli Innocenti, in the complex designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, finally hosts Cell XVIII (Portrait), a work of strong visual impact in powerful resonance with the history and collection of the place, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith with Arabella Natalini and Stefania Rispoli, where Bourgeois’ works seem to seek the breath left by hundreds and hundreds of abandoned children and mothers in difficulty who lived in the same environments over the centuries. Both exhibitions will remain open until October 20, 2024.
