Catalogue
Louise Bourgeois: el retorno de lo reprimido (The Return of the Repressed)

The edition of two special volumes on the work, writings, and thoughts of Louise Bourgeois emphasizes the start of her extraordinary production in Argentina. An unedited publication, in the framework of a truly artistic event for the city, the country, and the region. The catalogues that accompany the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: the return of the repressed will be offered for sale in the bookstore at Fundacion Proa at a very reasonable price.

Rigorously selected by Philip Larratt-Smith, curator of the exhibit, the unedited texts, widely cited but never reproduced, are translated in Spanish for the first time by Jaime Arrambide. They have never been published in a single volume in English. The texts are evidence of the impact of psychoanalysis on Louise Bourgeois’ creative process and allow us to discover one of the artist’s central creative dimensions: her writings. Notes, impressions, questions, lists, biographical sketches, annotations in the margins of lectures by Freud, Melanie Klein, and Lacan, among others entries, are included. Her writing is art, and art appears in her writing.

The first volume is comprised of new essays of special relevance, translated by Graciela Speranza, Marcelo Cohen, and Martin Schifino. Larratt-Smith reflects on sculpture as a symptom in the artist’s work. In another text, the curator attempts an interpretation of the psychoanalytic concept that forms the backbone of the proposal: the return of the repressed. The prominent North American historian and critic Donald Kuspit reconstructs the artist’s therapy experience with Henry Lowefeld, Louise Bourgeois’ analyst of thirty years. In another essay, Kuspit traces the mechanisms of the symbolization of loss in Bourgeois’ work. The German specialist Meg Harris Williams, who has an extensive formation in psychoanalysis, lucidly narrates the artist’s life and work. Jealousy and the back and forth of the therapy process are the object of British psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell’s study. In L., the historian Mignon Nixon connects Louise Bourgeois’ words with her artwork in a revealing lecture. Elisabeth Bronfen replays the fight between Bourgeois and her father. Finally, the Belgian psychologists Paul Verhaeghe and Julie de Ganck delimit the zones of artistic production and therapeutic and contextual foundation. The first volume is complete with reproductions of the 87 works in the exhibit— objects, drawings, sculptures, and installations—a biography of the artist and a bibliography.

Louise Bourgeois: el retorno de lo reprimido
(The Return of the Repressed)
ISBN 978-987-1164-12-7
Catalogue: 308 pp / 27 cm x 19 cm / 85 color reproductions
Psichoanalytic writings: 192 pp / 27 cm x 19 cm
$ 300.- / U$S 75.-

The catalogue is available at Proa´s Library:
libreria@proa.org / +54 11 4104-1005

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