Image: Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York
Craig Starr Gallery will present ‘Louise Bourgeois: Germinal,’ an exhibition organized with The Easton Foundation, opening September 17, 2026.
The two-floor presentation brings together sculptures on the first floor and drawings on the fourth. It focuses on Bourgeois’s defining work of the 1960s, described as a turning point in her practice, and traces the emergence of a formal and symbolic vocabulary involving the fragmented body, the ambiguous sexual object and the repeated organic form.
The sculptures extend this shift through pouring, repetition and hand-shaping, while embedded pins, glove-poured plaster fingers and clustered protrusions suggest growth and transformation.
The fourth-floor drawings include Bourgeois’s Cumul works, whose rounded contours suggest clouds, cells, breasts or landscapes. In these drawings, rhythmic repetition functions both as a formal method and as a psychological necessity, with repeated units symbolizing continuity and predictability and allowing unstable psychic states to be reordered through recurrence.
The exhibition presents the sculptures and drawings as parallel uses of a shared vocabulary rather than treating the drawings simply as studies for sculpture or the sculptures as translations of drawings.
