Louise Bourgeois & Gary Indiana: To Whom It May Concern

by Louise Bourgeois (Artist), Gary Indiana

Originally published in a large-format limited edition of seven copies, To Whom It May Concern pairs Louise Bourgeois' luminous male and female torsos with Gary Indiana's prose poems, in a meditation on physicality, sexuality and relationships. Violette's publication reproduces this artist's book--one of the last projects Bourgeois completed before her death in 2010--in a reduced, collectable format. Bourgeois' headless bodies, printed en face in erotic stand-off, represent male and female at their swollen bellies, heavy breasts and engorged phalluses, all rendered in rich pinks, purples, reds and blues. Indiana's short, visceral but lyrical texts are interspersed throughout in an electric blue typewriter font, conversing with these images through an unconventional non-narrative on the limits of flesh, desire and intimacy. Simple and elegant in design, and exquisitely printed, To Whom It May Concern throbs with stripped-down eroticism and the sensualities of image and language juxtaposed.

76 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2011

About the author

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and print-maker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.