We are pleased to announce the placement of "Femme" (2005) by Louise Bourgeois into an esteemed institutional collection.
Executed in 2005, when the artist was in her nineties, "Femme" belongs to the remarkable final chapter of Bourgeois's (1911–2010) practice, in which she devoted her creative energies with increasing concentration to the subject of the family, as daughter, mother, and body. Cast in bronze with a silver nitrate patina, the sculpture presents an abstracted pregnant female form that draws simultaneously on the ancient iconography of the fertility figure and on the most intimate register of autobiographical memory. The choice of bronze, a material historically associated with the male-dominated monumental tradition, to give form to an essentially feminine experience is wholly deliberate: it enacts the same tension between vulnerability and permanence, softness and endurance, that characterizes Bourgeois's approach across all media and periods.
The work connects directly to Bourgeois's documented experience of Basophobia, a fear of falling that first developed during her first pregnancy, and to the broader psychological landscape she inhabited as a woman of a particular generation, navigating the mixed feelings of impending motherhood. Each impression of the artist's hand preserved in the bronze surface belies the material's hardness; the work holds within it both the memory of touch and the accumulated weight of feeling.
"Femme" is one of a limited edition of six plus one artist's proof; the present example is the fifth. Bourgeois's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and numerous other major institutions worldwide. She has been honored with countless solo exhibitions and surveys around the world.
We are pleased that this quietly irreducible work, a testament to Bourgeois's lifelong capacity to transform personal memory into universal form, has entered a distinguished institutional collection. This acquisition was facilitated by Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates.