Louise Bourgeois - Evening & Day Editions London Thursday, January 21, 2021 | Phillips

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  • Louise Bourgeois was an obsessive list-maker, writing things down in diaries, on the backs of drawings, and on countless sheets of paper. Serving the same function as making sculpture, the act of writing harnessed her unpredictable emotions and thoughts, giving them concrete form outside of her body and mind. Bourgeois’ fascination with dictionaries and encyclopaedia’s enhanced her keen sensitivity to language, enabling her use of words with precise meaning and nuance. The artist kept three types of diaries, ‘the written, the spoken (into a tape recorder), and my drawing diary, which is the most important’. In I Said Yes With My Eyes Bourgeois repeats the word ‘Yes’, encircling her deep inner thought in the centre of the image, and reinforcing her message without saying it aloud. 

    "I love language...you can stand anything if you write it down. Words put in connection can open up new relations...a new view of things." —Louise Bourgeois

    • Literature

      Museum of Modern Art Cat. No. 1000

    • Artist Biography

      Louise Bourgeois

      French-American • 1911 - 2010

      Known 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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I Said Yes With My Eyes (MoMA. 1000)

2004
Unique soft-ground etching with hand-additions in watercolour, gouache, and coloured pencil, on handmade Dieu Donné paper, the full sheet flush-mounted to another sheet of handmade Dieu Donné paper (as issued).
I. 43.2 x 45.7 cm (17 x 18 in.)
S. 65.1 x 54.6 cm (25 5/8 x 21 1/2 in.)

Signed in pencil on the front, numbered 10/12 and annotated 'Study' in pencil on the reverse, from the series of unique colour variants, published by Osiris, New York, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 ‡♠

Sold for £50,400

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Evening & Day Editions

London Auction 21 January 2021