Louise Bourgeois was an artist who worked primarily with sculpture . Throughout her life, Bourgeois' work was created from revisiting of her own troubled past as she found inspiration and catharsis from her childhood years and the abuse she suffered from her father. Her work deals largely with memory and catharsis, the repressed and the recalled. Sexuality is another one of the most important themes in her work; the link between sexuality and fragility or insecurity.
Destruction of the Father is a biographical and a psychological exploration of the power dominance of father and his children. The piece is a flesh-toned installation in a soft and womb-like room. Upon entering the installation, the viewer stands in the aftermath of a crime,
"…telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. There is tragedy in the air. Once too often he has said his piece. He is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself. A kind of resentment grows and one day my brother and I decided, 'the time has come!' We grabbed him, laid him on the table and with our knives dissected him. We took him apart and dismembered him, we cut off his penis. And he became food. We ate him up… he was liquidated the same way he liquidated the children."
Bourgeois frequently used the idea of the horrific or monstrous, creating uncomfortable and bodily installations. Her large spider sculptures called Maman, speak to the idea of maternal abjection discussed by Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror. These sculptures play on the idea of the female body as a site of horror and repulsion. Motherhood and the female body become linked to monstrosity.
Destruction of the Father is a biographical and a psychological exploration of the power dominance of father and his children. The piece is a flesh-toned installation in a soft and womb-like room. Upon entering the installation, the viewer stands in the aftermath of a crime,
"…telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. There is tragedy in the air. Once too often he has said his piece. He is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself. A kind of resentment grows and one day my brother and I decided, 'the time has come!' We grabbed him, laid him on the table and with our knives dissected him. We took him apart and dismembered him, we cut off his penis. And he became food. We ate him up… he was liquidated the same way he liquidated the children."
Bourgeois frequently used the idea of the horrific or monstrous, creating uncomfortable and bodily installations. Her large spider sculptures called Maman, speak to the idea of maternal abjection discussed by Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror. These sculptures play on the idea of the female body as a site of horror and repulsion. Motherhood and the female body become linked to monstrosity.