Louise Bourgeois UNTITLED (detail) (1998-2014), Suite of 8 Holograms © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY.

Throughout the course of her fifty-year career, artist Louise Bourgeois has experimented with a broad span of media, while remaining primarily focused around her foundational sculptural works and works on paper.  That broad range of work is offered a new wrinkle in Holograms, a recently concluded exhibition at Cheim & Read that brings together a body of work never been shown in its entirety in the Chelsea exhibition space’s intimate rear gallery.  Offering a profound elaboration on the artist’s less-known approaches to her work, the show documents Bourgeois’s dialogue with the New York-based fine arts holographic studio C-Projects, resulting in eight holographic photographs blanketed with an alluring red tone, which granted the artist the potential to orchestrate her contemplative, often surreal techniques in this unexpected, yet fertile, medium.

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The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men (Installation View) feat. Louise Bourgeois, Filette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99) and Diane Arbus, Young couple on a bench in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. (1965) via Art Observed

Cheim & Read is currently presenting the second installment of the gallery’s The Female Gaze series which had its inception with 2009’s Women Look at Women.  In the succeeding episode, on view through September 2nd, the female eye remains the object, but its subject switches to men, forming a full circle subversion on the male-centric narrative of art history. Placed as the subject, men—dressed or stripped, confident or meek, benevolent or distant—fill in the role of the objectified model, triggering the question of how influential the gender of its author is for interpreting an artwork.  The exhibition aims to investigate whether knowing these works, and their origins, impacts the viewer’s reading of each respective work. (more…)

 
Installation view. All images courtesy of Cheim and Read unless otherwise noted.

For the first time in its fifteen years, Cheim and Read is showcasing all of its female artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Diane Arbus, for a celebratory exhibition. Less of a critical show on feminism, the exhibition is more of a simple gathering of varied artists. “The Women in Our Life: A Fifteen Year Anniversary Exhibition” reminds us of the voice and vision of some of these major players in contemporary art.

More story and images after the jump…

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