NEW YORK.- The nonagenarian artist Louise Bourgeois is world-renowned for her highly personal, remarkably diverse, and emotionally resonant sculptures. During the span of her career, however, she has produced a substantial number of works on paper, which have been shown more widely in Europe than in the United States. From June 14 to September 21, 2003, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present The Insomnia Drawings, a single work consisting of 220 individual drawings   created over an eight-month period of sleep-deprived nights between November 1994 and June 1995. The exhibition, organized by Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art, will be presented in the Lobby Gallery as part of The Contemporary Series.
"For more than sixty years, Bourgeois has made drawing a daily practice that has become a necessary, almost constant, activity," notes Rinder. "For Bourgeois, drawing is an essential part of the creative process and a way for the artist to return to, and work through, specific motifs and themes. These drawings, which convey a sense of informality, a direct immediacy, and an emotional urgency, were made in the middle of the night, and they are filled with obsessive forms and highly abstracted autobiographical reflections and memories."
The 220 red, blue, and white drawings deal with themes often addressed in Bourgeois’s varied work, among them childhood memories, water, plants, figures, and buildings and the patterns these images inspire. The Insomnia Drawings are especially notable for being even looser and more gestural than many of Bourgeois’s other works on paper. They are also exceptional for their frequent inclusion of elliptical, poetic French or English texts scrawled in the margins, integrated into the compositions, or scribbled on the flipsides of the paper.
This exhibition of drawings continues a longstanding relationship the Whitney Museum has had with the artist since she was first invited to participate in its Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in 1945. Since that time, Bourgeois has contributed drawings, sculptures, or paintings to fifteen Whitney annual exhibitions, as well as to Biennials in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Her work was also included in the museum’s 1976 Bicentennial exhibition 200 Years of American Sculpture. The Whitney Museum became one of the first public institutions to collect the artist’s work when it acquired her painted wood sculpture One and Others (1955) in the 1950s. Today, the Whitney’s Permanent Collection holds 22 Bourgeois works, a representative sampling of her oeuvre, including sculptures in bronze, wood, and mixed media, drawings, prints, and an illustrated book. Curator Lawrence Rinder organized the traveling exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Drawings for the University Art Museum at University of California at Berkeley (1996) and authored a book with the artist, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations (1995).
Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois grew up in the French countryside, where her family ran a tapestry restoration workshop. Bourgeois later returned to Paris to earn her B.A. in math and attend the Sorbonne. She left the university at the age of 25, preferring to study art and art history at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, the Académie Julian, and at the studio of Fernand Léger during the 1930s. In 1938, she married American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City, where she has lived and worked ever since.
Bourgeois had her first one-person show in 1945 and exhibited regularly in New York in the following decades. She also held teaching and visiting artist positions at Columbia University, New York Studio School, Pratt Institute, The School of Visual Arts, and Yale University, among others. Important museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, began to acquire her drawings and sculptures as early as 1951, but Bourgeois’s sculpture did not receive widespread critical attention until the late 1970s; her drawings remained relatively unnoticed until the late 1980s. Her works have been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Kunstverein in Frankfurt. In addition, Bourgeois has participated in many important international exhibitions of contemporary art, including the Venice Biennale (1993), where she represented the United States. Among her numerous awards are the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1985), the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French Minister of Culture (1991), and the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington, D.C. (1991). She has also been given the Mayor’s Award for Art and Culture, New York City (1993), the National Medal of Arts presented by President Clinton (1997), the Wexner Prize from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University (1999), the Golden Lion for a living master of contemporary art from the Venice Biennale (1999), and the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts (2002).