Persistent Antagonism

Louise Bourgeois’s paintings were shown as part of the Belvedere’s three-hundred-year jubilee. The Belvedere dedicated a major solo exhibition to the artist who, like virtually no other, has shaped the art of today. 

Presented in the Baroque galleries of the Lower Belvedere, Louise Bourgeois’s paintings from the 1940s were placed in dialogue with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from all periods of her storied career. In an oeuvre which covered a wide range of formal and material experimentation, Bourgeois succeeded in expressing contradictory impulses and binary oppositions – figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious – within a single work. By the 1990s, she had won global renown for her artistic achievements, becoming famous for her monumental spider sculptures and room-sized Cells. But it was in her oil paintings made between 1938 and 1949 that the French-American artist first developed the formal vocabulary and defined the thematic concerns that she would continue to explore over the following seven decades. 

The exhibition represented the first time these paintings were exhibited as a body of work in Europe, and was the first major exhibition of Bourgeois’s work in Vienna in a generation. 

Curators: Sabine Fellner and Johanna Hofer.