Hauser & Wirth Publishers is pleased to present a landmark publication that couples the works of Louise Bourgeois and Pablo Picasso for the first time. Entitled Louise Bourgeois & Pablo Picasso: Anatomies of Desire, the richly illustrated publication fosters a discourse on the work of Bourgeois and Picasso by exploring the differences and affinities in the artists’ formal, thematic, and iconographic language. The book accompanies an eponymous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich and builds upon the complex conversation about gender the exhibition sparks, with newly commissioned texts by curator Marie-Laure Bernadac (former curator at the Louvre, Musée Picasso (Paris), and Centre Pompidou), Émilie Bouvard (art historian and curator), Jerry Gorovoy (president of Louise Bourgeois’s foundation, The Easton Foundation), Ulf Küster (curator at the Fondation Beyeler), Gérard Wajcman (psychoanalyst and writer), and Diana Widmaier Picasso (art historian).
About the exhibition
Louise Bourgeois & Pablo Picasso: Anatomies of Desire is the first time that Picasso is presented in a dual dialogue with a female sculptor and brings together over 90 works including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from important public institutions and private collections such as the Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Basel), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas), and Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague). Curated by highly renowned specialist Marie-Laure Bernadac, former curator at the Louvre, Musée Picasso (Paris), and Centre Pompidou, the exhibition was organized in close collaboration with the Louise Bourgeois Studio.
The presentation displays intentional pairings of works, “by placing these artists together for comparative analysis, this exhibition sheds new light on their oeuvres and rids us of the clichés of the virile painter armed with a phallic brush and the sculptress armed with a knife,” explains curator Marie-Laure Bernadac. The original inspiration for the pairing came from an exhibition organized by the Beyeler Foundation in 2011, curated by Ulf Küster, which presented works by Bourgeois in dialogue with works by modern masters from the Beyeler collection confirming the artist’s position as one of the key bridges between modern and contemporary art.
About Hauser & Wirth Publishers
Artists’ voices, exceptional art, scholarship, design, and bookmaking are at the heart of Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ program. Publications have always played a vital role at Hauser & Wirth, as resources for and lasting records of the gallery’s exhibitions and artists’ work. Hauser & Wirth Publishers has grown to become a leading imprint for unique, object-like books that encourage an understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art. With the special access granted by artists to their writings and archives, Hauser & Wirth Publishers offers a program of more than 25 titles per year and also publishes the quarterly art magazine Ursula. Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ backlist comprises monographs, artists’ books, and exhibition catalogs—often bringing new and overlooked aspects of an artist’s creative practice into focus.
Titles from the Hauser & Wirth Publishers program can be found at each of Hauser & Wirth’s gallery locations. Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ newly opened headquarters in Zurich features a publisher’s bookshop that joins its counterparts in New York and London—shops that also serve as local hubs for communities and artists, where the gallery presents a range of public programming.
