End of Softness 1967

Louise Bourgeois made this bronze sculpture, titled "End of Softness", and look at how the bronze is cast with such fluidity. It's like capturing a moment where forms are still resolving, or perhaps dissolving, into something else. The surface has this incredible tension between smoothness and texture. The way the light catches those curves, those bulges – it’s almost sensual. Bourgeois is so good at making materials embody psychological states. I can feel an ambivalence in the piece, like the title suggests, “End of Softness,” which I read as the loss of something, or the hardening of an emotion. Think of a work by another sculptor, like Medardo Rosso, who was also obsessed with capturing fleeting, ephemeral moments in bronze. Both artists remind us that sculpture can be as much about capturing a feeling, a psychological state, as it is about form. I wonder what softness means to you, and what it looks like when it ends?