Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith
This major survey of Bourgeois’s work, titled “The Return of the Repressed,” is being billed as the “first in-depth examination of the artist’s relationship to psychoanalysis.” Yet that over-eggs the pudding, since all Bourgeois exhibitions—be they modest or ambitious—must engage psychoanalysis as the most convincing mode of formal interpretation. Indeed, the sculptor’s Freudian analysis was as transformative for her work as Jackson Pollock’s Jungian analysis was for his. At Fundación Proa, an exhibition of nearly one hundred pieces made between 1946 and 2009 takes on this subject directly, as does a catalogue featuring an examination of the late artist’s recently uncovered writings. Cold-shouldered by AbEx society, Bourgeois should now be seen as having but one AbEx parallel—Pollock himself_.
