The internationally acclaimed contemporary master Louise Bourgeois is the subject of the solo exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, on view from February 9, 2022, at the Hayward Gallery in London, UK. Located at the Southbank Centre—the largest cultural institution in the UK—the Hayward Gallery has staged exhibitions featuring prominent artists such as Bruce Nauman, Anish Kapoor, Tracey Emin, and Lee Bul since opening in 1968. Bourgeois’ retrospective, which focuses exclusively on works made with fabrics and textiles, presents approximately 90 pieces created during the artist’s last two decades.

Since the mid-1990s, Bourgeois started to incorporate a range of textiles including clothing, linen, and tapestry fragments in her work. The artist, who believed in “the magic power of the needle … to repair the damage,” perceived the actions involved in fabricating these works—cutting, ripping, sewing, adjoining—as a means of coping with childhood traumas.

The installations, sculptures, collages, fabric drawings, books, and prints showcased in the exhibition often feature the spider motif recurrent throughout Bourgeois’ oeuvre. Growing up in a family that ran a tapestry restoration business, Bourgeois came to associate the spider and its ability to weave a web, with her mother. Situated in one corner of the gallery space is Spider (1997) from Bourgeois’ Cells series, which she began creating in the 1990s. Observed in the piece is a spider straddling an enclosure filled with a selection of objects, which directly reference the artist’s personal history—a broken watch, perfume, and old tapestries—evoking its role as a protector of the house.

Also showcased in the exhibition is a comprehensive selection of the artist's fabric heads. The fabric busts displaying various patterns and textures represent a range of psychological emotions including isolation, neglect, and abandonment, deeply rooted in the artist’s subconscious. Portrayed on one side of Untitled (2002) is a beast-like image that alludes to recurrent themes of duality and ambivalence present in Bourgeois’ oeuvre, expanding on the artist’s interest in animalistic desires and primitive urges inherent in humans. Alongside the fabric heads is a series of columnar figures evoking Bourgeois’ vertical pillar-like sculptures from the 1940s and 1950s, which are rendered in soft textiles instead of steel and wood, as in her older works. The exhibition, which showcases a large number of works by an artist who regarded art as a means of alleviating her childhood trauma, remains on view through May 15, 2022, and will travel to Gropius Bau, Berlin, in July 2022.