Laura Gascoigne

Part-gothic horror, part-Acorn Antiques: Louise Bourgeois, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

Even the artist's most spectacular constructions smell of must and Little Old Lady Land

The show’s pièce de resistance: ‘Spider’, 1997, by Louise Bourgeois [© The Eastern Foundation/Vaga At Ars, Ny, And Dacs London 2021 Photo: Maximilian Geute]

Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the Father’ (1974). The father in question was not her American late husband Robert Goldwater, the father of her children, but her own French father Louis Bourgeois, long deceased. Set in a space evoking the interior of a digestive tract, the installation’s centrepiece was a table bearing the remains of an imagined feast at which Louise and her brother had eaten their dominating father after dismembering him and cutting off his penis.

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