Description
Day and night, love and hate, calm and chaos, conscious and unconscious. Explore Louise Bourgeois’s world of tensions and extremes in this striking new book dedicated to one of the most influential artists of the past century.
Bourgeois (France/USA 1911-2010) is renowned for her fearless exploration of human relationships across a relentlessly inventive seven-decade career. Featuring more than 200 images of Bourgeois’s work, a selection of her writings and dream recordings, and new perspectives on her work by filmmaker Jane Campion and writer Chris Kraus, this book reveals the extraordinary reach and intensity of her art.
From her haunting Personage sculptures of the 1940s to her iconic spiders and tough yet tender textile works of the 1990s and 2000s, Louise Bourgeois: Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day? is an essential guide to this singular artist and an exploration of the polarities at the heart of her art.
This publication accompanies a major exhibition of Bourgeois’s art presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and documents its dramatic presentation in the renowned post-industrial gallery called the Tank. It features further texts by exhibition curator Justin Paton, Bourgeois expert Philip LarrattSmith and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, and a richly illustrated chronology of the artist’s life.
Jane Campion is an award-winning New Zealand-born Australasian filmmaker. She is the writer and director of the internationally acclaimed films The piano (1993) and The power of the dog (2021), for which she has received two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Other films include Sweetie (1989), An angel at my table (1990) and Holy smoke! (1999). Her television work includes the miniseries Top of the lake (2013) and Top of the lake: China girl (2017). She is currently the director of a pop-up two-year film school aimed at emerging writer/directors and funded by Netflix.
Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three essay collections and a literary biography of
Kathy Acker. Her books include Summer of hate (2012), Where art belongs (2011), Torpor (2006), Video Green: Los Angeles art and the triumph of nothingness (2004), Aliens and anorexia (2000) and the acclaimed novel I love Dick (1997). She has written about art and culture for The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and many other publications. She is a co-editor, alongside Hedi El Kholti, of the independent press Semiotext(e). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at ArtCenter.
Philip Larratt-Smith is a curator and writer based in New York. Since 2019, he has been curator of The Easton Foundation in New York, which administers the legacy of Louise Bourgeois. In 2012, he presented Bourgeois's psychoanalytic writings in the exhibition and two-volume publication Louise Bourgeois: The return of the repressed (2012). His recent exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois's work include Louise Bourgeois: Freud's Daughter at the Jewish Museum, New York (2021).
Justin Paton [content editor and author] is head curator of international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His recent projects for the Art Gallery include Francis Upritchard: Here Comes Everybody and (with co-curator Lisa Catt) Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter and the inaugural Tank project Adriän Villar Rojas: The End of Imagination. Paton's books include How to look at a painting (Awa Press, Wellington, 2005), McCahon country (Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamäki & Penguin Random House New Zealand, Auckland, 2019) and, most recently, the book of the Dreamhome exhibition (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023).
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City and teaches at The New School for Social Research. Webster is the author of Conversion disorder (Columbia University Press, New York, 2018) and The life and death of psychoanalysis (Karnac, London, 2011), and the coauthor of Stay, illusion! the Hamlet doctrine (Pantheon and Vintage, New York, 2013). A collection of her writings, Disorganisation and sex, was published in 2022 (Divided Publishing, Brussels). She writes regularly for Artforum, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times.
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