Cell (Glass spheres and hands)
(1990-1993)
- Medium
- glass, iron, wood, linoleum, canvas, marble
- Measurements
- (a-m) 219.5 × 218.8 × 220.0 cm (installation)
- Place/s of Execution
- New York, New York, United States
- Accession Number
- S8.a-m-1994
- Department
- Contemporary Art
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with the assistance of the Leslie Moira Henderson Bequest, 1995
© Louise Bourgeois (The Easton Fnd.)/VAGA, New York. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia Sydney
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
Identity and self-scrutiny, memory, and the inherent tensions of human relationships are the core of Louise Bourgeois’s art. Although Bourgeois often referred to her works as a means of processing memories of traumatic episodes from the past, it is the ongoing presence of the past in her memory, and the layers of her personal history and psyche that generate her diaristic art. Bourgeois is acclaimed as one of the most innovative artists to have emerged in the United States in the second-half of the twentieth century. She was especially prolific from the early 1980s, and from 1990 produced a vast series of ‘cells’ – cubic or cylindrical chambers into which she placed objects and smaller works found in and around her studio.
The industrial window frames of Cell (Glass spheres and hands) typify Bourgeois’s environments.
In this work the artist reconfigures her family, including her father’s mistress, each member represented in the form of a glass sphere closed off from the possibility of interpersonal communication. The clasped hands are Bourgeois’s self-portrait, and, like other fragments of anatomy that appear consistently in her works, embody anxiety, isolation and emotional intensity.