MALAGA.- Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, into a well-to-do family that ran a workshop that restored medieval and Renaissance tapestries. In 1938, she moved to the United States, where she was to live for the rest of her life. A member of the American Abstract Artists Group, she achieved critical acclaim and commercial success at the age of 71, following the retrospective organized by MoMA in 1982. Her original and complex oeuvre is both diverse and fascinating, examining memory, sexuality, motherhood, human relationships and the quest for balance.

Louise Bourgeois’ career coincided with that of Pablo Picasso in a number of ways: they both produced most of their artistic work in a country other than their own; innovation and experimentation were constant features of their lengthy artistic careers, and their respective oeuvres have served as referents for subsequent generations of artists.

“FOR ME, SCULPTURE IS THE BODY. MY BODY IS MY SCULPTURE” L.B.

Bourgeois worked with all genres to create her unique, lyrical and radical works: sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation art. She devised sculptures in various formats, produced evocative drawings and engravings, and built unsettling installations. In a world where women were considered second-class artists, Bourgeois’ work acquired iconic status; so much so that she is considered the most important female artist of our time.

After the wooden sculptures she produced in the 1940s, Louise Bourgeois began to experiment with the representation of fragments of the human body. But it was her famous bronze spiders that brought her international fame. So, for this exhibition her sculpture Spider (1996), will be installed at MPM. It is almost 8 metres in diameter and over 3m high. This was how the artist depicted her own mother: as an enormous arachnid, patient, protective and endlessly weaving – in direct reference to her mother’s job at the family’s tapestry restoration firm.

“I HAVE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK. AND, LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL” L.B.

The MPM retrospective will show 101 works by Louise Bourgeois, produced between the 1940s and 2009. Forty-six sculptures in bronze, textiles, latex and aluminium, one cell and one painting, will be shown alongside 53 works on paper and fabric, many of which are large-format or produced in series. The works selected for this exhibition cover the complex variety of Bourgeois’ work, and are divided into nine sections: The Runaway Girl, Loneliness, Trauma, Fragility, Natural Studies, Eternal Movement, Relationships, Taking and Giving, and Balance. Curated by Müller-Westermann and organized alongside Moderna Museet, the exhibition brings together over 100 artworks produced over seven decades, one third of which have never been shown before.

As a prelude to the exhibition, visitors will be able to see Louise Bourgeois: Photo Album, which takes a look at the artist’s life in photographs. There will also be a screening of the documentary directed by Nigel Finch in 1994 for the BBC, Louise Bourgeois: No Trespassing, and a video produced by Museo Picasso Málaga containing interviews with Jerry Gorovoy, chairman the Louise Bourgeois Foundation, The Easton Foundation, New York; the exhibition’s curator, Iris Müller-Westermann; and the artistic director of MPM, José Lebrero Stals.

The catalogue is richly illustrated and published in English. A selection of the written contents have been translated in to Spanish and can be downloaded from the MPM website. A 32-page booklet in both Spanish and English has also been published for visitors, explaining the various areas into which the exhibition has been divided. It also contains a brief biography of the artist. Following the exhibitions Sophie Tauber-Arp. Avant-garde Pathways (October 2009-January 2010) and Hilma af Klint. Pioneer of Abstraction (October 2013-February 2014), Museo Picasso Málaga is once again running a retrospective that showcases the work of the women artists in art history.