Louise Bourgeois is best known for giant spiders. This Paris exhibition goes somewhere quieter. Louise Bourgeois. Extrême Tension opened at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on 20 October and runs until 21 February 2027.
Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and died in New York in 2010. She grew up in a family that restored old tapestries, and thread, cloth and repair run through her whole career. She worked into her nineties, and much of her late work was made on paper and in fabric.
A national library is a fitting place to see that side of her. The BnF holds one of the great print collections in the world, and a show here puts the emphasis on the intimate end of her work: things made at a table, at close range, to be looked at closely.
The title says what to expect. Bourgeois spent her life turning fear, anger, loneliness and memory into objects. Go slowly.
