View from the Fondazione Vedova exhibition 'The Fabric Works' exhibition ©Fondazione Emilio e...

Thoughout the summer of 2010, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova will be showing the work of the late sculptor Louise Bourgeois in the newly restored Magazzino del Sale, (“salt warehouses”) at the Zattere in Venice. On show, in the spectacular Venetian space, designed by Renzo Piano, will be the artist's late works, most of them never seen before, from drawings to sculptures and her series of "Fabric Drawings", created between 2002 and 2008.
Principally montages, collages and assemblages of pieces of her own clothes and linen, these works have an unsettling and surprising energy that stems from their richness of colour and language, as well as from their symbolic and intimate character.

Untitled, 2007 ©Christopher Burke / Courtesy of Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve

Together with the large steel sculpture Crouching Spider, 2003, that opens the exhibition in Venice, they reflect a utilization of personal textiles, something which she began to do in the sixties, out of which the artist created drawings and sculptures. Many of them are made from her clothing and that of members of her family like her mother: a reincarnation of the past and of her childhood, as well as a testimony to her relationship with memory. A visual and plastic use of fabrics that transforms them from decorative accessories into emotional and sentimental allusions that serve, especially in the sewn reliefs and the Cells, as well as in her representations of the human figure and her relations with the other, from her father to her mother, to form images of a tormented but powerful femininity.
Bourgeois has explained what drove her to create these works in the following words: ‘I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable. Clothing is also an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that? They are like signposts in the search of the past.’ This set of works, enriched by a comprehensive anthology of images of the artist’s entire production of sculpture, is reproduced in its entirety, almost as if to form a general catalogue of the subject, in the volume Louise Bourgeois. The Fabric Works, edited by Germano Celant and published by Skira, Milan.
Created by Emilio Vedova and his wife Annabianca, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova is situated at Dorsoduro 46, at the Zattere in Venice. The main aim of the Fondazione is to promote the art and work of Vedova and to highlight his importance in the history of 20th century art through a series of initiatives, such as studies, research projects, analyses, exhibitions, itineraries and teaching spaces, conferences, scholarships and prizes.
www.fondazionevedova.org

Published 16.06.2010