Restless mind

Organic imagery dominates the work from the mid-1960s, with suggestions of nests or lairs (entrapment again), and the vulnerability/aggression polarity which appears so frequently in Bourgeois’s work. Rage can be productive. As she says, ‘When I do not “attack” I do not feel myself alive.’ The basic urges which animate her work — wanting, giving, destroying — form an uneasy balance in the spectator, helped out by Bourgeois’s own drive towards peace and calm. ‘I am free,’ she says, ‘because I use the aggression I am suffering from against the sculpture.’ And she reminds us how art keeps the crime rate down: ‘To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.’

Bourgeois is good at the comic aspect of sex, typically combining male and female attributes in many of her sculptures, which are often both phallic and labial, and certainly explicit. But she cannot resist the temptation to disturb, piercing a vast penis and suspending it from the ceiling, or decapitating the beautiful male in ‘Arch of Hysteria’ (1993), the lithe acrobat in polished bronze who contorts himself into a wheel. In her infamous sculpture ‘The Destruction of the Father’ (1974), her childhood act of modelling a bread figure of her hated father and eating it is re-enacted in an installation of plaster, latex, wood, fabric and red light. Cannibalism is transcended but the trauma still bites.