Art Madrid'23 – Louise Bourgeois in Picasso\'s Malaga Museum

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) returned from hell like someone returning from a pleasure trip, full of ideas, motivated, rejuvenated ... "I've been to hell and I've come back... and let me tell you it was wonderful," is the title of a work by the artist dated in 1966, an embroidered handkerchief that talks about the balance and serves as a provocative title of the exhibition that has landed in the Picasso Museum in Malaga.

 
The exhibition, curated by Iris Müller-Westermann and organized by the Moderna Museet, covers seven decades of the career (and life) of the Franco-American artist through 101 works created between 1940 and 2009, one third of which have never been exposed before. The exhibition is arranged in thematic sections, following the symbolic and evocative Bourgeois's style with names like The Fugitive, Soledad, Trauma, Fragility, Relationships, Giving and receiving and Balance... Concepts that also highlight how deep and complicated their work was, always crossed by psychological states, emotions, sexuality, memory, human relations and identity. 
 
"Louise Bourgeois never differentiated between art and life," said at the press presentation Jerry Gorovoy, president of The Easton Foundation, an institution that manages the legacy of the artist ... For Bourgeois, art "was a healing art."
 
Louise Bourgeois was born into a wealthy and educated family  dedicated to the restoration of antique tapestries that moved to the US in the late 30s, where Louise developed her career as part of the American Abstract Artists Group.
 
Her work encompasses virtually all artistic disciplines, with sculpture as her favorite language: "The sculpture is the body, my body is sculpture," Bourgeois defended. In Malaga you can enjoy from her first wooden pieces from the 40s to her representations of the human body with fabric and metal. They are her big Spiders (... spider, mother, protective, weaver and patient ...) which will make it world famous. The critical acclaim and the market arrived late, she had already 71 years old, with the retrospective dedicated the MoMA in 1982, and Louise Bourgeois was recorded in the History of Art as the most important female artist of our time. It was the second woman who exhibited at MoMA, after Georgia O'Keeffe.
 

The Picasso Museum also shows the most intimate side of the artist, Louise Bourgeois: Photo Album, a room that traces the life of the artist in photographs and complete with the documentary `Louise Bourgeois: No Trespassing' of Nigel Finch for the BBC Channel.

 

In the year 2020 in the heart of Barcelona a wandering gallery was born, the same one that in February 2021 would debut at Art Madrid with an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary portraits; with this subject matter it would manage to create a powerful dialogue between artwork and audience and make the seal Inéditad remain in the history of the event that contained it.

Jean Carlos Puerto. Protección. Oil and copper leaf on wood. 60 x 48. 2021. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Since that first time and until today, the wandering gallery has managed to build projects on otherness, has repositioned in the spotlight the discourses on the LGTBIQ+ collective, has consolidated a group of artists who share its principles of resilience and empathy and the best thing is that it continues to bet from the professionalism and commitment to give voice to the difference.

Claudio Petit-Laurent.. El Joven de la Perla. Oil on wood. 30 x 30 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Inéditad Gallery, thanks to its founder Luis López, its collaborators and the infinite possibilities manifested in the works of the artists it represents, is a gallery that has demonstrated its capacity and courage to stimulate the sensibility of the public through art and seduce a generation that moves between the glass window and the analogical story. Inéditad is a nomadic gallery that has gathered around it a community of artists and has moved the context with exhibition projects that think about LGTBIQ+ art without prejudices.

Pepa Salas Vilar. Las marcas del arcoiris. Oil on canvas. 40 x 50 cm. 2022. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pride and Prejudice was inaugurated. An exhibition that brings together the works of sixteen artists: Abel Carrillo, Alex Domènech, Carlos Enfedaque, Silvia Flechoso, Jamalajama, Daniel Jaén, Claudio Petit-Laurent, Jean Carlos Puerto, Fernando Romero, Pablo Rodríguez, Pepa Salas Vilar, Jack Smith, Pablo Sola, Bran Sólo, Elia Tomás and Utürüo. Painting, illustration, photography and digital art are the manifestations that bring into dialogue around fifty neatly threaded pieces, in a discursive line that discusses such a latent phenomenon as discrimination. To achieve this, the artists invited to the exhibition question themselves whether: Does discrimination exist within the LGTBIQ+ collective?

Pride and Prejudice Official Poster. Image courtesy of the gallery.

With approaches on and from the body, the proposal invites to celebrate diversity, proposes to question and self-question the prejudices and attitudes of society against the collective. Pride and Prejudice is a space for dialogue about the constructs imposed on us by society. It is also an oasis in which to deconstruct with tolerance and respect the subjectivities that sometimes prevent us from approaching the production of the participating artists, simply because "the beautiful" does not fit in an androgynous body. The subjugation of stereotypes are pressed with determination to find the beauty of diversity in other palpable facets of reality.

Pablo Sola. All men are dogs. Photography. 2014. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Throughout these three years Inéditad has stimulated the vindictive projection towards bad practices, has questioned estates around the LGTBIQ+ body and the most admirable thing, is that these capacities have resurfaced around the dialogue and the visual narrative of the stories that are told from the visual: Artworks that are people, art that is, per se, humanity. Overcome impositions and accept what is different in order to continue fighting against homophobia, biphobia, lesbophobia or transphobia and defend the equal rights that all the acronyms of the collective deserve in our community.

That's Pride and Prejudice: One creature, the happiest in the world. And maybe other projects and other people have said it - or felt it - before, but none so fairly.

Silvia Flechoso. Hola, soy maricón. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

From June 8th until June 22nd you can visit Pride and Prejudice. Carrer de Palau núm. 4. Canal Gallery space. Barcelona.