Untitled 2006

Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day, made this untitled work using gouache. Looking at it, I’m wondering about the nature of enclosure. We have those blue shapes forming perimeters and boundaries. Are they protective, or limiting? It’s all rectangles, circles, and lines, but then that lone red circle sort of turns the whole thing up-side down. The red mark destabilizes the balance. It introduces a tension and makes me think about the relationship between order and chaos, inside and outside, control and freedom. You can tell Louise Bourgeois was thinking about how repetition and slight variations can change the way we experience a thing. I’m reminded of Agnes Martin, who used grids to map emotions, or Eva Hesse, who turned simple shapes into complex, psychological forms. It's all a conversation, a game of telephone between artists across time. Each one picks up the thread and twists it into something new.