“The repetitive motion of a line, to caress an object, the licking of wounds, the back and forth of a shuttle, the endless repetition of waves, rocking a person to sleep, cleaning someone you like, an endless gesture of love.” – Louise Bourgeois
Executed only four years after her first solo exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, the present lot Untitled, from 1949, is exemplary of the artist’s drawing technique that is at once intimate and discernible, allowing for subtle variations of linearity and iconographical references. The repetition and density of the lines evolve through her careful hand in a systematic hatching, creating voluminous, supple forms that pulse with a frenetic, dynamic energy. The linear motif evokes the artist’s deeply personal connection to skeins of thread, replete in her childhood memories from wool for tapestries, braided stalks of onions and chair frames hanging from the attic, and thread whirling through spools. The present lot finds elegant expression in the varying thickness of ebony lines, coursing throughout the primal composition and suggesting fundamentally organic forms that delight our eye and challenge our spatial perceptions. Bourgeois’s linear means transform the sheet and enable her to move seamlessly from one line to the next, from foreground to background, weaving between shapes. For Bourgeois, the imagery in works such as Untitled with vertical shapes seemingly suspended in air summon tender recollections of her childhood in Antony, France. She has reminisced, "The attic was very large because of the slope of the house. Antique chair frames were hung from the ceiling everywhere. My father collected them. He would take them down from the ceiling very delicately and examine them" (Louise Bourgeois in Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, Flammarion, New York, p. 32, 1996). Uniting the diversity of formal elements, including line, form, and color, into a resilient, timeless space elevates the composition to become limitless in its possibility and infinite in its implications.