“I am what I do with my hands.”
Louise Bourgeois, transcribed from an interview for the documentary “Identity” by Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, broadcast by PBS, September 2001, quoted here from: How Louise Bourgeois Confronts the Past through Sculpture, Art21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NloOARl7NaI.."

Unveiling the Soul: The life and work of Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. In her highly personal, complex, and diverse artistic oeuvre encompassing sculpting, installations, painting, drawing, graphic and performance art, the artist processes experiences and traumas she endured during her long life in a cathartic manner and engages with female sexuality, her troubled relationship with her father and her love for her sick mother, birth and death, her role as a mother, wife and artist, self-doubt and profound human emotions.
As a child, Bourgeois suffered deeply from her family's strong patriarchal structure, her emotionally conflicted family life, and her father's infidelity. In 1932, Bourgeois began studying mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris but abandoned her studies in favor of visual arts. In the years that followed, she studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the École du Louvre, and several art schools and artists' studios, including the studio of Fernand Léger (1881-1955). After marrying art historian Robert Goldwater (1907-1973), the couple moved to the US in 1938, where Bourgeois continued her artistic work. However, her career progressed slowly, and she did not achieve any major success at first. Her earliest series of works include the “Personnages” (1945-1955), freestanding wooden sculptures reminiscent of urban architecture but which function primarily as sculptural physical references to human figures. In the years that followed, Louise Bourgeois worked with a wide variety of materials, including latex and plaster, textiles, marble, bronze, and found objects and everyday items. In the 1980s, she created the first works of her “Cell” series, unique environments, some of which could be entered or viewed through peepholes. In the 1990s, Bourgeois finally created her first “Spider” sculptures in steel and bronze, now among the artist's most famous works. From 2000 onwards, she produced a series of monumental giant spiders entitled “Maman.”



Friendship, vulnerability, compassion, and protection: The Welcoming Hands
In her art, Bourgeois tries to give her fears a physical form so she can overcome them. She does this by creating her own visual language and symbolism, using recurring motifs like spiders, body parts, and houses. These motifs let viewers share in her emotional world and innermost feelings. Her art and her life, experiences, and memories are inseparable.
The present work “The Welcoming Hands” from the series of the same name was created in 1996. It is a cast of the hands and forearms of the artist and her assistant, good friend, and close confidant Jerry Gorovoy, whom the artist, almost 70 years old at the time, met at an exhibition curated by Gorovoy at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo in 1980. On that occasion, she criticized the presentation of one of her works. However, the dispute was resolved, leading to decades of close collaboration and friendship.
The intertwined hands in “The Welcoming Hands” symbolize the trusting relationship between Bourgeois and Gorovoy: “It is really our hands. It shows how much I care about the whole thing. It shows how much the emotion these express is true. It is an emotion that has been lived and is real; it's not something made up.” (Louise Bourgeois, transcribed from an interview for the documentary “Identity” by Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, broadcast by PBS, September 2001, quoted here from: How Louise Bourgeois Confronts the Past through Sculpture, Art21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NloOARl7NaI)
In some works from this series, the artist's hands offer protection, while in others—such as in the piece offered here—she is the vulnerable one seeking protection. With this work, Bourgeois addresses her attachment to and dependence on her closest friend and assistant, who not only assisted her in her studio throughout her life but also supported her during times of personal struggle with fears and self-doubt. “When you're at the bottom of a well, you look around and wonder who's going to get you out. In my case, Jerry comes along with a rope; I cling to the rope, and he pulls me out.” (Louise Bourgeois in an interview with Lawrence Rinder. 1995, quoted from: Jean-François Jaussaud, Louise Bourgeois. The Artist's House, Munich 2019, p. 27)
Since 2000, a version of the six bronze casts mounted on large stones, entitled “The Welcoming Hands,” has been part of the collection of the French Fonds National d'Art Contemporain and has been on display in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.



"If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed."
Like her world-famous spider sculptures, “The Welcoming Hands” is imbued with a fascinating ambiguity. It tells of friendship, protection, and reliability, while the isolated, silvery limbs lend it a disturbing, almost morbid notion reminiscent of Bourgeois' spiders. A wonderful work from her sought-after late creative period, the sculpture impressively illustrates the artist's complex psyche, which served as her most important source of inspiration throughout seven decades of artistic endeavor. It is an intimate, three-dimensional representation of her most important personal bonds and innermost feelings. “A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you say, 'What does this mean? Well, if you don't have any feeling about this, well, I can't explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.” (Louise Bourgeois in an interview for the documentary ‘Identity’ by Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, broadcast by PBS, September 2001, quoted here from: How Louise Bourgeois Confronts the Past through Sculpture, Art21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NloOARl7NaI)

From her early wooden “Personnages” in the 1940s to her soft, stuffed fabric figures of the 2000s, Louise Bourgeois' work revolves around the human figure and the existential themes of “being human.” Isolated limbs, especially hands, are a recurring motif with very different meanings and a wide range of materials. In 2006, following “The Welcoming Hands,” the artist once again portrayed her hands and those of her assistant Jerry Gorovoy in the colored print suite “10 am Is When You Come To Me.” Louise Bourgeois died at the age of ninety-eight in 2010. She remained artistically active until her death. The piece offered here was cast in 2010 while the artist was still alive.



"One of the most remarkable and influential artistic personalities of our time" (Fondation Beyeler)
The versatile oeuvre of centennial artist Louise Bourgeois was not honored before 1982—after five decades of artistic activity - when the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. In 1992, she participated in documenta IX in Kassel, and the following year, the artist represented the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale, where she exhibited again in 2005. In 1999, she was awarded the “Leone d'oro” for her life's work and, in the same year, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale. In 2007, a major traveling exhibition dedicated to her work toured the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The list of major solo shows in recent years reads like a who's who of the world's most important museums: following the Belvedere in Vienna (2023/24) and the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo (2023), there are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2022), the Kunstmuseum Basel (2019), the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2018), the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), the Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2016), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2015), as well as the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel (2011/12). [CH]