LOUISE BOURGEOIS / HANS BELLMER

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010)

HANS BELLMER (1902-1975)

 Bodies distort, breaking down. Forms of male and female genitals fuse with one another. Male bodies become fetishes, with missing members; others are doubled and androgynous bodies result. The sexually charged works of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer reveal remarkable parallels, even though the artists have never actually met. Louise Bourgeois lived in Paris until 1938, where she studied art, then went to New York, where her career as an artist began. There she maintained loose contacts to several of the Surrealists living in exile.

Bellmer moved from Berlin to Paris in 1938, where he joined the Surrealists and regularly exhibited with them. Louise Bourgeois, a feminist by conviction, exposes in her works the conventional understanding of sexual identity. She skeptically examines the traditional image of women and in the process also reflects on the Surrealist view of women.