LONDON.- Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Series is a fascinating insight into the printmaking work of one of the most influential artists of recent decades.

Accompanying Hayward Touring’s latest exhibition, this new publication collects two intimate and personal print series created by Louise Bourgeois late in her career. The Autobiographical Series (1994) captures Bourgeois’ deepest thoughts and memories, while her set of 11 Drypoints (1999) offers a more abstract perspective, using metaphor to conjure the dreams and images that haunted her to the very end of her life. Featuring familiar motifs, from womb-like figures to stairs and ladders, feet, long hair, clocks, scissors, bathtubs and pregnancy, the prints in these two portfolios are inspired by her obsessions with memory and the human condition.

Alongside the 25 prints, this compact and elegant new publication also features an introductory essay by Roger Malbert, that offers an overview of the role that printmaking played in the artist’s long career, as well as an illuminating essay by acclaimed psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell that explores themes of childhood, trauma and sexuality in Bourgeois’ work.

Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Prints presents these two fascinating portfolios together for the first time, opening a new window into the mind of this celebrated artist.

Hayward Touring’s latest print exhibition features two series by one of the most important and influential artists of recent decades, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). Best known for her powerful emotionally charged sculptures, steel cage installations and fabric figures, her output was formidable, growing more expressive as she aged. This French-American artist’s work, whether in sculpture, drawing or printmaking, always maintained strongly autobiographical themes, centering on her own obsessions and vulnerabilities - loneliness, insecurity, anger, sadness, desire.

Autobiographical Series (1994) captures some of her deepest thoughts and memories, whilst the set of 11 drypoints (all from 1999) brings these anxieties into more abstract territory. Featuring familiar motifs, from the pregnant woman to the cat, the prints in these two series are clearly inspired by her obsessions with the human condition. Womb-like figures, stairs and ladders, feet, long hair, clocks, scissors, bathtubs and a pregnant mosquito all contain charged references to memory, with such titles as ‘Empty Nest’, ‘Paternity’, ‘Please Hang in There’ and ‘Mother and Child’. The print entitled ‘Fear’, as part of 11 drypoints, for example, shows a person crouched inside a triangle that is slowly squeezing her into a tight space. The memory of her mother sewing – the Bourgeois family ran a successful tapestry company – is evoked in ‘Sewing’, in the Autobiographical Series.

Printmaking had a special place in Bourgeois’ oeuvre. After moving to New York in 1938 with her American husband Robert Goldwater, she began to make prints prolifically, regularly attending Atelier 17 (a printmaking studio recently relocated from Paris to New York). Here, she was inspired by other professional printmakers who helped translate her drawings into editions. It was an accessible medium in which she could easily work from home whilst raising her three children. This continued until 1949, when Atelier 17 changed hands and she decided to focus on sculpture. After her husband’s death in 1973, she became a teacher of printmaking at The School of Visual Arts.

As a sculptor, it is not surprising that she was inspired by the actual tools used for printmaking – the tactile process of digging into, or scratching metal with a needle or burin. Through printmaking, Bourgeois enjoyed the ability to make many changes over the course of an edition, experimenting with the depth of transparency with certain elements of her drawings, which typically resulted in a number of different states until she was satisfied. The possibilities of retaining parts of her original drawings whilst amending others was something that she felt was not available to her in painting or sculpture. She said ‘the whole history of the creative process is there’. After many years focusing primarily on sculpture, Bourgeois fell back into printmaking as she aged – from the 1980s until her death in 2010. The two series in this exhibition were made whilst she was in her eighties, after installing a small press in her own home. Printmaking became the medium that brought her practice full circle.