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Bracha L.E / Louise Bourgeois
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Braverman Gallery is pleased to present "Two" a new exhibition of works by artists Louise Bourgeois and BRACHA L.E, on view at the gallery’s online viewing room. "Two", surveys the practice of these prominent female artists across media and time spans. Working in disparate formal vernaculars, the works of both artists can nonetheless be characterized by a deeply personal, uncompromising artistic style that explores trauma, femininity and memory and that challenges the hegemony of the defining movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Over the past 25 years a multitude of conceptual and physical connections between Louise Bourgeois’ and BRACHA L.Es work have been established. Art historians such as Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher and Rosi Huhnhave traced the commonalities shared by these important contemporary artists, despite their generational and geographical distances.
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Bourgeois and BRACHA first exhibited side by side in the groundbreaking 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible at the ICA Boston, MA (which traveled to the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Whitechapel, Gallery, London, UK; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia). The exhibition featured works by Agnes Martin, Mona Hatum and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, and shone a spotlight on subliminal links that exist between female artists from different generations. Later Bourgeois and Ettinger were featured in the exhibitions Gorge(l): Oppression and relief in art at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, in 2006-2007 alongside Frida Kahlo, Marlene Dumas, Francesca Woodman, and more; and in Elles at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010) which presented them, each in her different way and period, as pioneering artists alongside Ligya Clark and Sherri Levine.
Currently, both artists’ works are exhibited in Psychic Wounds, the Warehouse, Dallas together with Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman and Cecily Brown, Gerhard Richter, to name a few. Inside the Visible, Gorge(l), and Psychic Wounds are dynamic examples of an arc of exhibitions where, spanning the course of 25 years, the curators recognized BRACHA L. E's inspiration and invited her to contribute a theoretical article. The connections between Louise Bourgeois' and BRACHA’s work have been esteemed in a variety of textual contexts, including Rosi Huhn’s essay “Louise Bourgeois: Deconstructing the Phallus within the Exile of the Self” where the art historian analyzed Bourgeois’ artistic expressions using BRACHA L.E concepts. Another example is the critically acclaimed book Women Artists of the Millennium (MIT Press, 2011), where each chapter was dedicated to a single female artist such as Bourgeois, BRACHA, Sally Mann, Pipiloti Rist and Francesca Woodman, published following a symposium by the same title, held at Princeton University in 2001, marking the 30-year anniversary of Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”. Another notable occasionwas Griselda Pollock’s lecture What if Art Desires to be Interpreted? Remodelling Interpretation after the ‘Encounter-Event held at the Tate Britain, July 2010.
However, given the vast web of connotations, this is the very first time where the works of Bourgeois and BRACHA are exclusively and directly juxtaposed in the format of a comparative two-person exhibition.
The junctions where the practices of BRACHA and Bourgeois meet are particularly relevant. Despite belonging to different eras and using distinct materials and forms, the works of both artists present a deep engagement with themes of subliminal trauma, the feminine unconscious, and motherhood. For BRACHA the experience of women and mothers in wartime is crucial. Given the insurmountable barriers posed for female artists who were also mothers, even as late as the mid 1990s, breaking the taboos instated by male-centric hegemony as well as by second wave feminist theory, Bourgeois and BRACHA―each of her own accord―formed different explorations where issues of motherhood and trauma could transform the artistic space and its abstract values.
The exhibition however, does not only present an inquiry into the confluences and refluences of the artists' practices and an examination of the core of each of their artistic productions. It offers a new interpretative model that stimulates thinking while it arouses feeling. Opening a variety of generative possibilities, TWO matrixially' investigates the interplay of formal, conceptual, material and metaphysical planes within each artwork, with an emphasis on Bourgeois’ sense of empowerment and BRACHA's sense of vulnerability.
In her capacity as a philosopher BRACHA L.E has developed the Matrixial―a highly complex theoretical model that explores, through art-practicing and psychoanalysis, the thresholds of identity and memory with an emphasis on witnessing and caring. Through an exploration of the gaze and phantasmatic screen, shared affect and artistic 'com-passion', she opens new horizons and suggests perspectives on ethics and aesthetics, on beauty, the uncanny, trauma, and the sublime, which allow a fresh look at both artists’ work.
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BRACHA L.E, Kadish n.1 , 2015-2019, oil on canvas, 40 X 30
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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2000, ink and pencil on paper, 27.94 X 18.73 cm, © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS)
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BRACHA has been quoted saying that it is the destiny of the artwork to be interpreted: “artists continually introduce into culture all sorts of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way, the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness, cultural meanings, etc, and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic.”
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Louise BourgeoisSans titre, 1946ink on blue paper14 5/16 x 5 5/8 in.
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Louise Bourgeois, Janus, 2008
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BRACHA, Untitled # 10146
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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1941
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BRACHA L.EUntitled , 2013India ink and watercolor on paper5.5 X 15.5 cm
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Louise BourgeoisNature Study, 1986Marble73.7 x 144.8 x 71.1 cm. (29 x 57 x 28 in.)Unique
© The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS)
A new exhibition of works by artists Louise Bourgeois and BRACHA L.E, on view at the gallery’s online viewing room. "Two", surveys the practice of these prominent female artists across media and time spans.
Past viewing_room