“It is really the anger that makes me work,” Louise Bourgeois said in the 2008 documentary “The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine.” A new large-scale retrospective at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum dedicated to the French American sculptor and artist goes in search of hope all the same. Bourgeois (1911-2010) was known for her raw, bodily sculptures, manifestations of aggression and obsession and long-held fixations on her mother and father carried from childhood.
The exhibit opened Sept. 25, the first major show of Bourgeois’ work in Japan since a 1997 show at Yokohama Museum of Art and her largest solo show in the country to date. Down to its title, “I have been to hell and back.
And let me tell you, it was wonderful,” the show emphasizes a deep ambivalence — toward femininity, memory, parenthood and the human body. The visionary Bourgeois is considered one of the most influential Western artists of the 20th century, but she is perhaps best known among the general public for her giant steel spider sculptures, the first of which was completed in 2000. That may be even more true in Tokyo, where a nearly 10-meter tall bronze cast of the original spider has loomed over the walkway in Roppongi Hills since 2003 and which is much more recognizable than the name Louise Bourgeois.
Surrounded by the gleaming complex, with its glass facades and steep escalators, the spider appears like a Lovecraftian monster, nimbly landed and poised to attack the futuristic city..
