Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin

A collaboration between the late Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin seems fitting: Although the careers of the two artists overlapped for only roughly a decade, both developed reputations for provocative explorations of gender, sexuality, and the emotions intertwining them. In doing so, however, they employed vastly different means—Bourgeois is known primarily for her subtly suggestive anthropomorphic sculpture, while Emin’s later autobiographical installations were sensationalized for their jarringly personal content—and so the current project’s union of the two remains surprising. The product of a friendship established between these artists, the works on view consist of ethereal archival dye prints on cloth that depict male and female torsos exaggerated by Bourgeois beyond the point of immediate recognition. After completion, Emin made additions to each, supplying bluntly personal, rawly emotional text and sketched figures.

Emin’s additions vary from the straightforward, such as a woman shown fellating a man, to more abstract, subtle developments of eroticism and vulnerability. This process highlights the qualities that lie at the heart, yet manifest so differently in both Emin’s and Bourgeois’s work. In I Wanted to Love You More, 2009–10, for instance, the elder artist contributed a blood-red female torso, severed at the neck and thigh, lying under a black expanse. In a characteristic gesture, Emin added a delineated nude female within the body. The title of the work, also contributed by the younger artist and included as a caption underneath the larger figure, enhances the desperation and frustrated desire in many of these works, while illuminating the universality of the sexuality, corporeality, and emotion underlying Bourgeois and Emin’s seemingly divergent production.