Restless mind

From the late-1960s to the late-1980s Bourgeois concentrated on making sculpture in marble. In 1980 she moved to a large new studio in Brooklyn, and, as Tate curator Frances Morris writes, ‘She was finally able to indulge her passion for hoarding, scavenging, collecting and mending’. From this studio emerged the powerful series of ‘Cells’, large-scale environments resembling a prison or an asylum in which Bourgeois could create her own architecture and explore even further her imaginative fantasies. Her big subject is our relationships with others, and her great skill is in the relationship of one object to another in her work. Thus the environments give full rein to her genius for juxtaposition, for eliciting new meaning and resonance from the bringing together of out-of-context objects.

Bourgeois possesses a highly developed access to her unconscious, as can be seen from the flowering of richly complex imagery in these ‘Cells’. She says they focus on various aspects of pain — psychological, physical or emotional — and contain narratives that are explicitly autobiographical. For instance, the tapestry fragments to be seen here and there refer directly to the tapestry studio her family ran in the town of Antony on the banks of the Bièvre river, while the weaving spider (even titled ‘Maman’ in one instance) stands for the mother. Yet the ability to decode Bourgeois’s imagery is not an essential requirement to responding to her work. The power of her imagination permeates the forms of her sculptures and drawings and can be felt without understanding its sources. In fact, Bourgeois’s obsessional vision can be overwhelming. The Tate show is strong meat: I recommend more than one visit to assimilate (or confront) this extraordinary artist.