69
Louise Bourgeois
Ode à l’oubli (Ode to Forgetting)
- Estimate
- $80,000 - 120,000
$274,000
Lot Details
The complete hand-made cloth book with 35 compositions: 30 fabric collages with archival dyes and 5 lithographs on fabric, bound with tie and buttonhole fastening (allowing the pages to be unbound).
2004
10 1/2 x 14 x 3 in. (26.7 x 35.6 x 7.6 cm)
With the artist's name and numbered 17/25 on cloth labels affixed to the inside of the back cover (there were also 7 artist's proofs), published by Peter Blum Edition, New York, fabrication, dyeing and digital printing by Solo Impression workshop and Dyenamix, New York.
Specialist
Full-Cataloguing
Catalogue Essay
This editioned fabric volume is modeled after a unique book she made in 2002 (MoMA collection) using textiles she had saved throughout her life, including scraps of nightgowns, scarves, and hand towels from her wedding trousseau, monogrammed with her initials. Bourgeois spent her childhood around fabric—her family had a tapestry restoration business—and she used the material for years in sculptures and as the support for prints and drawings.
Literature
Louise Bourgeois
French-American | B. 1911 D. 2010Known for her idiosyncratic style, Louise Bourgeois was a pioneering and iconic figure of twentieth and early twenty-first century art. Untied to an art historical movement, Bourgeois was a singular voice, both commanding and quiet.Bourgeois was a prolific printmaker, draftsman, sculptor and painter. She employed diverse materials including metal, fabric, wood, plaster, paper and paint in a range of scale — both monumental and intimate. She used recurring themes and subjects (animals, insects, architecture, the figure, text and abstraction) as form and metaphor to explore the fragility of relationships and the human body. Her artworks are meditations of emotional states: loneliness, jealousy, pride, anger, fear, love and longing.
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