The Borghese Gallery returns to open its doors to contemporary art: from 21 June, the marvelous sculptures of ancient Rome and the Baroque of the permanent collection will be able to dialogue with around twenty marbles, installations and fabric works by Louise Bourgeois, including, in the Meridiana garden, one of his famous “spiders”. It is the first exhibition of the French-American sculptor in Rome, as well as being the first time that the Borghese Gallery hosts a contemporary female author, although according to the creator Cloé Perrone, “Bourgeois is not only contemporary, she has within her all the art of the 20th century”. She was born in 1911 in Paris and died in 2010 in New York, she is one of the most influential artists of the last century.
Known above all for her sculptures, she traveled extensively throughout her life, but she arrived in Italy for the first time in 1967: she spent three months in Pietrasanta, near the marble quarries of Carrara, retracing the footsteps of her greatest predecessors: among all, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Some of the works exhibited at the Borghese Gallery, which the artist visited with great enthusiasm such as the Palazzo Barberini and the Vatican museums in that period, were created during that fruitful Italian stay. Louise Bourgeois The unconscious of memory will be open from 21 June to 15 September; and to see the works displayed on the upper floor, in the art gallery currently closed for works, we will have a preview in two of the already restored rooms. Even if the installation is temporary, the new colors can be appreciated in a context less crowded with works than usual. As Geraldine Leardi, who curated the exhibition with Perrone and Philip Larratt Smith, said, “the void in a museum is as important as the pause in a symphony”.
The works of the twentieth-century artist compensate for what is “the missing century” at the Borghese Gallery: this is why, Leardi explained, “we have hosted the sculptors of the twentieth century for many years. First Giacometti, then Picasso and the Tunisian designer Azzedine Alaia.” Bourgeois “is the first contemporary female sculptor to set foot in this place, which lives powerfully on sculpture. Even though she favored Portuguese pink marble, there is a direct relationship with Bernini’s materials and ancient marbles.” The layout designed by the curators is full of suggestions of relationships between the works, but each visitor has the possibility of interpreting them in a subjective way. Canova’s Paolina Borghese is as always observed with the condescension that she deserves for the 15 centuries of history that separate her from Leda, of the very famous Roman sculptural group that portrays her with her swan.
Another two centuries passed for Bourgeois to sculpt in pink marble the “linked legs” of his assistant and friend Jerry Gorovoy, now exhibited in that same room. In that of Apollo and Daphne, an interpretation by Bourgeois on the theme of metamorphosis is exhibited: Topiary, which depicts the ephemeral moment of the transition from girl to woman. There is no shortage of examples of the large installations, the cages that the sculptor created in the last years of her life as Passage dangereux, to “cage the objects of her memory”, explains Perrone.
In the room dedicated to the busts of the Roman emperors, his “humanoid” heads are exhibited, patchworks of various scraps of fabrics and tapestries: the effect is that of a striking contrast with the porphyry and alabaster of the Caesars, a sort of “short circuit” to quote Leardi. In the aviary of the garden hang the works Spiral Woman and three versions of Janus, a series which, like the two-faced god, deal with the theme of duality, a theme much loved by Bourgeois who has always had the female question very clear and despite not recognizing himself in definition of feminist was adopted by the movement. “She lived for almost a century and throughout her life she worked to cleanse herself of childhood traumas,” commented the curator.