An articulated exhibition itinerary unfolds in 3 locations: Museo novecento, former building of the Leopoldine and Istituto degli innocenti
“Do Not Abandon Me” is the thematic focus of the exhibition at the Museo Novecento, in the former building of the Leopoldine and in the Istituto degli Innocenti, emblematic places of social support and childhood. Yes, Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911 - New York, 2010) would have liked this title, who warned:
“To be born means to be expelled, to be abandoned, it is from there that the fury comes, it is from there, from the incomprehensible tear of birth, from finding ourselves thrown without a booklet of instructions into existence, that we remain forever suspended between obsession and confusion.”
A creative furor that lasts until the age of 98 and that unhinges every commonplace. In '38, she arrives in the States with her husband, abandons the Parisian moorings of surrealism, and soon after, also those of the New York avant-garde. International success was consolidated with Documenta in '92 and with the lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale in '93.
HER CREATIVE FURY LASTS UP TO 98 YEARS AND DESTROYS EVERY COMMONPLACE
Her recurring metaphorical code—spiders, mutilated bodies, phallic protuberances, cages, guillotines, assembled and sewn garments—is the forerunner of much contemporary art. She brings phalluses under her arm as if they were baguettes or handbags: sometimes they are divertissement—memorable is the shot from the '80s by Robert Mapplethorpe—but mostly they are provocative and dramatic stagings of the dark sides of female humanity, of the domestic environment as an ambivalent place of love and suffering.
She clashes with the machismo of the father, who “hated artists,” and with the resignation of a hardworking and protective mother, but too resigned. Maman will become, in the imagination of the artist, the iconic spider, symbol of patience and perseverance. Each work becomes a dive into something ancestral, an intimate diary that attracts voyeuristically.
At the Museo degli Innocenti, the subject contained in *Cell XVII (Portrait)* (2000) dialogues with the iconography of Our Lady of Mercy, while the core of the works, about a hundred, are at the Museo Novecento. Many are on paper, including the red gouache of the last 5 years, evoking the cycles of life: disturbing images that seem made of body fluids, as if they were blood and amniotic fluid. In the courtyard, the great bronze spider *Spider Couple* (2003) welcomes visitors.
Coinciding with the exhibitions in Florence, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith and Sergio Risaliti with The Easton Foundation, two other exhibitions in Rome and Naples (until September 28th) show the inexhaustible research of an artist who has never given up.
