Louise Bourgeois & Jenny Holzer - The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page

An unprecedented insight into Louise Bourgeois' art by Jenny Holzer.

Two of the most original artists of the postwar period, Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer, meet in this exceptional artist's book conceived and designed by Holzer to accompany the Bourgeois exhibition she has curated at the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Despite their formal differences, both artists share a strong interest in psychological and emotional states, such as love, desire, sexuality, rejection, jealousy, murder, suicide, dependency, and abandonment. Where Holzer approaches these subjects from a more sociopolitical angle, Bourgeois derives them from her own psychic life.
Holzer's book is not a document of her Bourgeois exhibition but rather a parallel work that further mines the dynamic interplay between text and image in Bourgeois' art. Working in a sumptuous oversize format, she has set up a nonlinear narrative through juxtapositions of Bourgeois' works and writings, deploying extreme close-ups, dramatic croppings, full-page bleeds, and other devices to startle and refocus our attention on Bourgeois' preoccupations and obsessions. At times these juxtapositions are enriched with works chosen from the historical collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel. The resultant confrontations are unexpected, jarring, and inspiring.

A fascinating montage of images and writings, this volume offers a unique perspective on Bourgeois' extraordinary oeuvre as filtered through Holzer's gaze.
The artist's book is accompanied by a booklet with texts by Kunstmuseum Basel director Josef Helfenstein and curator Anita Haldemann.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page at the Kunstmuseum Basel, February 19–May 15, 2022.

Born in Paris in 1911 and a New Yorker since 1938, Louise Bourgeois created a unique oeuvre—that owes no allegiance to 20th-century "isms"—in the course of a career than has spanned more than 60 years. Psychologically charged and dealing with the realm of human emotion (love, desire, dependency, sexuality, rejection, jealousy, and abandonment), her art is grounded in her own life and experience: "My goal is to re-experience a past emotion … to relive anxiety … anxiety is a passive state, and the object is to be active and take control." Yet Louise Bourgeois did not create an autonomous universe as an artistic hermit. While her art is nourished by personal experience, it also draws from art and art history—a wellspring of inspiration from which she developed her themes, concepts, and approach to media in both two- and three-dimensional works.

Jenny Holzer (born 1950 in Gallipolis, lives and works in New York) is internationally renowned for her exploration and subversion of public language through the use of nontraditional forms, from street signs and T-shirts to projections and LEDs.

Edited by Jenny Holzer.
Texts by Anita Haldemann and Jenny Holzer.

P9783037645840ublished in April 2022
English edition
32,3 x 35,5 cm (hardcover)
296 pages (304 color ill.)
ISBN : 978-3-03764-584-0

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