“When you reach the top of the stairs there is nothing there, but still to succeed (to exist) you must proceed, even if this means starting completely anew…”
—Louise BourgeoisLouise Bourgeois was a prolific printmaker, draftsman, sculptor and painter, known for her idiosyncratic style and as a pioneer of iconic twentieth and early twenty-first century art. Bourgeois first experimented with printmaking in the late 1930s, starting with simple relief techniques and graduating to study lithography at the Art Students League in New York. In the mid-1940s Bourgeois turned her focus towards sculpture, neglecting her printmaking practice, only to return in the 1980s when the medium became an integral part of her artistic expression. Her work was both commanding and quiet, meditating on the complex and profound emotional states: loneliness, jealousy, pride, anger, fear, love and longing.
“To alleviate anxiety we retreat from the world to the comfort of the object, and to this object we attribute great value and power.”
—Louise BourgeoisBourgeois’s recurring treatment of objects and subjects as form and metaphor to explore the fragility of relationships and the human body remains at the core of her work. Bourgeois’s early prints endowed chairs, tables, clocks, bathtubs, and storage cabinets with the symbolism of family, intimacy, and the artists struggle with her own identity as a wife and mother. When Bourgeois returned to the medium of print, almost four decades after her first experiments, the ladder motif became an important part of her visual language, reoccurring throughout her work in many different mediums. The ladders depicted in Bourgeois’s aquatint do not lead anywhere, they symbolize vertical, upward movement that leads to an empty, dark void. The ladders are a representation of the artist’s own emotional journey through fear and vulnerability. In Bourgeois’s monumental 2008 sculpture, Cell (The Last Climb), currently in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the ladders take the form of a visually and symbolically similar spiral staircase. When discussing this work and the ladder motif Bourgeois states that they are an encouragement to keep living and growing, even when life leads into the intangible and unknown. The ladders are a refusal to retreat and regress into the artist’s fears, they are a visual symbol of perseverance and bravery.
