Louise Bourgeois, I Have Been to Hell and Back Handkerchief (Pink Edition), 2007

Louise Bourgeois

I Have Been to Hell and Back Handkerchief (Pink Edition), 2007

Embroidery and Silkscreen on 100% Cotton Handkerchief

Signed in plate, Work bears Louise Bourgeois' authorized silkscreened initials and is hand numbered 37/1000

Frame included

Provenance
Tate Gallery gift shop

This long sold out coveted limited edition embroidered handkerchief, is based on a larger original, which Bourgeois created in 1996. The formal serif typeface and the horizontal lines that run across this work make it reminiscent of a students' composition. Created on the occasion of Bourgeois' 2007-08 exhibition at the Tate Modern, London - selling out shortly after. What makes this work especially collectible is that the design was created and this limited edition made in close collaboration with the artist during the artist's lifetime - and it was never re-authorized or re-issued. Created on the occasion of Bourgeois' 2007-08 exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, it was offered at the Tate Gift shop and sold out shortly after. Louise Bourgeois' embroidered handkerchief was created in three variations, blue, red and pink - the present being the pink edition. It bears Bourgeois' iconic and memorable phrase, "I Have Been to Hell and Back and Let Me Tell You It Was Wonderful." The work is held in its original vintage frame and is ready to hang. The work itself has the artist's silkscreened initials, and it is hand numbered from the limited edition of only 1000

Measurements:
Frame:
14.5 x 14.5 x 0.5 inch
Artwork itself:
11.5 x 11.5 inches

About Louise Bourgeois:
Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

Bourgeois’s work is inextricably entwined with her life and experiences: fathoming the depths of emotion and psychology across two- and three-dimensional planes of expression. ‘Art,’ as she once remarked in an interview, ‘is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma.’ Arising from distinct and highly individualized processes of conceptualization, Bourgeois's multiplicity of forms and materials enact a perpetual play: at once embedding and conjuring emotions, only to dispel and disperse their psychological grasp. Employing motifs, dramatic colors, dense skeins of thread, and vast variety of media, Bourgeois's distinctive symbolic code enmeshes the complexities of the human experience and individual introspection.

Rather than pursuing formalist concerns for their own sake, Bourgeois endeavored to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining a wide range of materials—variously, fabric, plaster, latex, marble and bronze—with an endless repertoire of found objects. Although her oeuvre traverses the realms of painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois remains best known for her work in sculpture.

Bourgeois’s early works include her distinct 'Personages' from the late 1940s and early 1950s; a series of free-standing sculptures which reference the human figure and various urban structures, including skyscrapers. The ‘Personages’ served as physical surrogates for the friends and family Bourgeois had left behind in France, while also highlighting an interest in architecture dating back to her childhood. Her installation of these sculptures as clustered ‘environments’ in 1949 and 1950 foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre’s rise to prominence.

Bourgeois’s work was included in the seminal exhibition ‘Eccentric Abstraction,’ curated by Lucy Lippard for New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Major breakthroughs on the international scene followed with The Museum of Modern Art in New York's 1982 retrospective of her work; Bourgeois's participation in Documenta IX in 1992; and her representation of the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 2001, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective of her works, which subsequently traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., cemented her legacy as a foremost grande dame of late Modernism.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth