(in Search Of) the Perfect Lover: Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon

by Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy

Notwithstanding their considerable differences and individuality--one would hardly expect them to have a lover in common--Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon share an artistic intent to explore eroticism and sexuality. Each artist deals, in his or her own stylistic way, with the intense physical states of ecstasy, passion, conflict and fear. Working through the medium of drawing--the "medium of the mind"--they trace themselves, scribing pictorial metaphors of an alternately tender, aggressive, attached, forceful and even erotic confrontation with the material. Creativity, itself never free from conflict, undresses itself in drawings that touch on obsession, desire and the pleasures of eroticism. (In Search of) The Perfect Lover groups together extensive works on paper from the Hauser and Wirth Collections, complemented by a selection of sculptures. Accompanying texts embrace the connections between body, eroticism, sexuality and creativity, as well as the potential conflicts embedded in each artist's work.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2003

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.