FRIEZE 2025 Confessions in open diary: art of Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois' "Red Room (Parents)" (1994) / Courtesy of The Easton Foundation (licensed by SACK, Korea)

Artist Louise Bourgeois / Courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) never disguised the fact that autobiography was the raw material for her art.

Hatred, rage, trauma, jealousy, desire — she cast them in bronze, stitched them in fabric and exorcised them in charcoal and ink over the course of more than seven decades.

“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving and of destroying,” she once declared.

Few artists in history have mined the caverns of their own psyche with such merciless candor. Fewer still have transformed those private agonies into a body of work so prolific, monumental and unflinchingly public.

In her world, mothers became colossal spiders, fathers were devoured at the family dinner table, and children hovered as uneasy witnesses, vulnerable and watchful.

Her sculptures are thus a diary in three-dimensional form — a confessional with its doors flung wide.

To enter a Louis Bourgeois retrospective is to step into her mind’s most intimate chambers, which she insisted on leaving unlocked.

Such is the case with “The Evanescent and the Eternal” at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, which opens Saturday.

With 106 sculptures, installations, drawings and prints, it is the largest Bourgeois exhibition ever staged here.

Korea marks the final leg of the show’s tour, following stops in Sydney, Tokyo and Taipei. Approximately 30 of the works on display are unique to the Hoam exhibition, with nearly half drawn from the collection of the Samsung Foundation of Culture, which operates the museum.

Louise Bourgeois' "Crouching Spider" (2003) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol, courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Spider mother

The most iconic image associated with the French American artist is a mammoth spider, rising over 9 meters high, its spindly legs arched. Bourgeois titled the massive steel piece “Maman,” the French word for “mom.”

First unveiled in 2000 at Tate Modern in London, it quickly became her emblem and was later cast into six bronze editions, one of which looms over the Hoam Museum’s lakeside park.

Inside the gallery, a smaller arachnid awaits, no less menacing in its presence.

There is a direct connection between the web-spinning creature and Bourgeois’ own mother, Josephine, who was a tapestry weaver. But the association runs deeper. The spider is a paradox — at once guardian and predator, spinning threads of both refuge and entrapment. Its towering form embodies her conflicted vision of motherhood: protective yet intimidating, a source of both tender comfort and uneasy terror.

Behind it, a videotaped 1978 performance “A Banquet / A Fashion Show of Body Parts” plays, in which a performer repeatedly sings, “She abandoned me.” The refrain echoes Bourgeois’ lifelong dread of abandonment, sharpened by the early death of her invalid mother, entwining love and fear into a single, unsettling vision.

Scattered across the museum’s two floors are smaller fabric and metal sculptures, visceral in their probing of motherhood in all its complexity. The artist approached the subject both as a daughter and as the mother of three sons. Works such as “The Good Mother” (2003) and “Breasts and Blade” (1991) lay bare this tension with unflinching directness.

Louise Bourgeois' "The Family" (2007) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol, courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Devoured father

If Bourgeois’ feelings toward her mother were ambivalent, those directed at her father, Louis, were far more extreme.

She constantly oscillated between a desperate need for his affection, dread of his emotional tyranny and deep resentment. His 10-year affair with the family’s English governess, tolerated by her mother, became one of the defining traumas of her life.

Those suppressed emotions erupt in “The Destruction of the Father” (1974), a stage bathed in lurid red light, where a family dinner table is piled with grotesque chunks of meat.

It visualizes her childhood fantasy, in which the domineering patriarch is dragged onto the table by his wife and children to be butchered and devoured.

Louise Bourgeois' "The Destruction of the Father" (1974) / Courtesy of The Easton Foundation (licensed by SACK, Korea)

Fittingly placed beside this installation is a video excerpt from the poignant 2008 documentary, “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.” In it, Bourgeois reenacts one of her father’s cruel dinner tricks of peeling a tangerine into the shape of a small figure with a penis before announcing to the table, “I thought she was my daughter, but obviously she’s not, because my daughter has nothing [between the legs]!”

“The Destruction of the Father” is seen as a precursor to the artist’s architectural “Cell” series of the 1990s, several of which appear in the Hoam exhibition. Each enclosed structure houses an assemblage of her personal belongings and sculptural elements — a microtheater of memory, pain and desire.

Louise Bourgeois' "Cell (Black Days)" (2006) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol, courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Opposing forces united

Bookending “The Evanescent and the Eternal” are two aluminum spirals: “The Couple” (2003) and “Untitled” (2004).

“A spiral is produced when opposing forces act upon one another,” noted museum curator Gina Lee at the press preview.

Louise Bourgeois' "The Couple" (2003) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol, courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Bourgeois spent her entire life exploring forces that seem irreconcilable yet remain inextricably bound: love and hatred, male and female, father and mother, intimate and colossal. Her works pulse with this constant push and pull, from “Janus Fleuri” (1968), a fused penis-vagina form, to “Fillette (Sweeter Version)” (1968-99), a sculpture of a little girl that is unmistakably phallic.

By transforming her most private battles into a universal language through art, her oeuvre embodies a lifelong negotiation of these tensions.

The spiral thus becomes her truest symbol — a form where opposites do not cancel one another, but coexist.

“The Evanescent and the Eternal” runs through Jan. 4, 2026, at the Hoam Museum of Art.

Installation view of "Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal" at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol, courtesy of The Easton Foundation