Centred around a series of gouaches that Bourgeois made in the final years of her life, PoMo's latest exhibition explores an artistic career haunted by the long-legged silhouettes of the past.
Towering bronze spiders, intertwined fabric bodies, and worn jumpers stiffened into abstractions. To walk through Louise Bourgeois’ art is to walk through her memories: the fragile fragments from a life that tell a story - and re-frame loss into love.
Nearly 16 years after her death, Trondheim’s PoMo is paying tribute to the French-American artist’s enduring legacy with an exhibition titled ‘Echo of the Morning’.
Centred around a series of striking gouaches made in the final years of her life, it’s a poignant meditation on the passage of time - and how the past clings, like a thinly-spun web, to identity.
“The title itself comes from a fabric series Louise made in 2006. A kind of diaristic, 24-sheet book that she made, where she cannibalises phrases from her writings,” Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition’s curator, said during an opening speech.
“It’s this idea that the past is never done with us. As Louise once said, her childhood had never lost its magic. It had never lost its mystery, and it had never lost its drama. And so, there’s this interplay of past and present in the gouaches, and the other works on display here, that forms the core of the exhibition.”
Mining memories
Born in Paris in 1911 to a family that restored antique tapestries, Bourgeois was profoundly impacted by the death of her mother in 1932. Abandoning her mathematical studies shortly after, she began studying art, opening a gallery next to her father’s shop before moving to New York with her husband, art professor Robert Goldwater.
From the painful relics of these early years, Bourgeois found endless inspiration. Her soft sculptures and looming bronzes, often symbolic of childhood fears around abandonment, became a way of manifesting emotional pain into a physical catharsis.
“Art is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma," she once said.
The impact of these traumas became more pronounced in her later years, as her physical health began to decline and her dependence on others grew. But with this also came a sharpened clarity about who she was, and the cyclical patterns that shaped her.
Through the creation of her gouaches, Bourgeois found a fluid method for releasing her anxieties, especially around motherhood and femininity. Their blood red images of breasts, babies, spirals and artery-esque florals reverberate throughout the exhibition, like scattered screams.
When seen in dialogue with her other works, including a bronze fountain that trickles with water and a series of embroidered clocks, a timeline emerges; one that’s both disjointed and interconnected by the distance of looking back.
“I wanted this to be more about time and memories, to show that there are different frames of different readings of her work,” Larratt-Smith, who worked as Bourgeois' literary archivist until her death, told Euronews Culture.
“That's why there are a lot of clocks in the show, a lot of markers of time. The fountain is really about the passage of time. The sound of the water is lived time, time as duration, a way of manifesting time. Hopefully, if the show succeeds, it succeeds in bringing this out. That these are memory documents, and at the same time a memoir of things that were bringing the past back to life for her.”
Fabrics of time
Best known for her monumental spider sculpture, 'Maman', which was created in 1999 in tribute to her mother, themes of maternal bonds have always been integral to Bourgeois' work. Here, they're starkest in their most delicate forms; her textile creations capturing the thinly held strands between nurturing and wanting to be nurtured.
One stand-out piece features a series of hand-sewn figures, beginning with a pregnant woman and ending with her crying adult son. The background is framed by a funhouse mirror, its warped curve revealing Bourgeois' anxieties about being an inadequate mother - but also the ways in which memories distort the truth.
Elsewhere, pre-loved jumpers and blankets form totemic-style structures, stretched and bronzed on poles, or shaped into children's building blocks. For Bourgeois, every object held importance; buoys of history she could cling to amidst the waves of time.
"I hope that people who know Louise's work will see some things, some sculptures that they haven't seen before," Larratt-Smith shared. "For people who don't know Louise's work, this is a strong introduction because it's all there in a sense. There's so much more beyond the gouaches. They're just one body of work."
While the National Museum of Oslo recently hosted the country’s first major presentation of Bourgeois’ work in over twenty years, PoMo, which opened last year, offers a more focused encounter.
Featuring soaring ceilings, a spiralling orange staircase and cosy reading den, the space seems to flow like a stream of nostalgia, always bringing you back to where you've been before.
"There is no last room. You end up going back to the first room, and that becomes the last one, which fits with the title, 'Echo of the Morning'. It's this idea of an endless return," Larratt-Smith said.
That endless return brings us closer to a truth: existence cannot be measured in straight lines. From the babies cradled in intricate netted bellies, to a two-headed silhouette suspended in the air, Bourgeois reminds us that we are not defined by time, but by the things we have loved.
The exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Echo of the Morning’ is on at PoMo in Trondheim, Norway until 31 May 2026.
