LOUISE BOURGEOIS & HANS BELLMER: DOUBLE SEXUS EXHIBITION
Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg
Sat 24 April – Sun 15 August 2010
“Bodies morph and dissolve, limbs go missing, while others multiply; male and female sexual forms merge into each other and give birth to androgynous beings – the sexually charged work of Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) bare many striking parallels to each other.
Although their paths crossed in Paris during the Surrealist heyday, Hans Bellmer, who fled to Paris from Nazi Berlin in 1938, and Louise Bourgeois, who in the same year made the move from Paris to New York, never actually met each other in person. Both artists created their respective oeuvres in relative reclusion before subsequently becoming known to a wider audience in their later years. Now for the first time, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg has created a dialogue between over 70 sculptural, graphic and photographic works by the two artists. Entitled ‘Double Sexus’, the exhibition sees the meeting of dolls and prostheses, with inviting glances gazing back at ballooning forms. Female fantasies and male fears, the ambiguous nature of everything sexual and the links between eroticism and creativity form the central topics of the exhibition. In the show, a display case is also dedicated to Hans Bellmer’s illustrations for Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’, accompanied by a series of Louise Bourgeois’s current works from 2009.
The work is characterised by a search for identity, an exploration of relations between the sexes and a fascination with the human body and the possibilities of sculpting it. By melding male and female, experimenting with the merging of sexual identities in dolls, photographs and drawings, Bellmer undermines the conventional balance of power between the sexes.”
From researching both Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer in depth for my dissertation on fetishism, i gained an insight into the context behind their works. It could be said that both artists were heavily influences by their childhood experiences – in particular their tense relationship with their dominant father. From a young age Bourgeois was belittled by her father, causing her to feel inadequate and inferior to the male sex. However, when Bourgeois became of age, she began to retaliate against her fathers views of her, becoming one of the most well known and thought after female artists of her time. In Bellmers case, he was brought up under the ruling of his Nazi father and sent to study engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, where he developed a love of politics. When Bellmer began to think for himself, he rebelled against his fathers beliefs and began to create art that questioned the way Germans understood the ‘perfect human’ by creating disfigured depictions of the female body with sexual and fetishtic overtones.
I regret that i was unable to see this exhibition, as both Bourgeois and Bellmer are two of the most inspirational artists for my own practice, and i believe seeing these works for myself would of benefitted my own interpretation and imagination around the topic of the female body.
visual tour of the exhibition: Double Sexus
KAYLEIGH ADAMS 