November 2025
Louise Bourgeois, Subject of Solo Exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal at the Hoam Museum of Art
The Evanescent and the Eternal, a solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), is currently on view at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, Korea. Marking the artist’s first exhibition in Korea in 25 years and the largest museum retrospective ever organized in the country, the show presents 106 works—spanning painting, sculpture, and installation—of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Bourgeois’s own writings, reflecting her lifelong exploration of memory, the body, and time. Themes of love, fear, abandonment, and the tensions and conflicts within the family—along with the inner fractures born of trauma—permeate her entire body of work. The exhibition captures and mirrors this psychological terrain. Moreover, through the dual concept of “the evanescent and the eternal,” the exhibition captures identities and emotions that waver continually along the boundaries between male and female, past and present, the unconscious and reality.
The exhibition brings together a large body of works, including Bourgeois’s early paintings from the 1940s and the Personages series; the groundbreaking installation The Destruction of the Father (1974), a symbolic stage of imagined revenge against a domineering father figure; the bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri (1968), which merges male and female forms; Red Room (Parents) (1994), one of the most significant works from her Cells series that began in the 1990s; Cell (Black Days), a powerful condensation of melancholy and sexual tension; and her late fabric works, spanning over seven decades of artistic practice.
The exhibition also showcases Bourgeois’s diaries, personal writings throughout her life, and psychoanalytic notes, illuminating the deep connections between her inner psyche and art. It further presents a projection by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, who reinterprets excerpts from Bourgeois’s texts, thereby deepening viewers’ experience of the exhibition. The exhibition runs through January 4, 2026.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Bourgeois’s own writings, reflecting her lifelong exploration of memory, the body, and time. Themes of love, fear, abandonment, and the tensions and conflicts within the family—along with the inner fractures born of trauma—permeate her entire body of work. The exhibition captures and mirrors this psychological terrain. Moreover, through the dual concept of “the evanescent and the eternal,” the exhibition captures identities and emotions that waver continually along the boundaries between male and female, past and present, the unconscious and reality.
The exhibition brings together a large body of works, including Bourgeois’s early paintings from the 1940s and the Personages series; the groundbreaking installation The Destruction of the Father (1974), a symbolic stage of imagined revenge against a domineering father figure; the bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri (1968), which merges male and female forms; Red Room (Parents) (1994), one of the most significant works from her Cells series that began in the 1990s; Cell (Black Days), a powerful condensation of melancholy and sexual tension; and her late fabric works, spanning over seven decades of artistic practice.
The exhibition also showcases Bourgeois’s diaries, personal writings throughout her life, and psychoanalytic notes, illuminating the deep connections between her inner psyche and art. It further presents a projection by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, who reinterprets excerpts from Bourgeois’s texts, thereby deepening viewers’ experience of the exhibition. The exhibition runs through January 4, 2026.
