The porous, pale limestone of Heide II in Bulleen currently houses works by Australian artists with a real or imagined relationship with Louise Bourgeois; a companion to the major exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Late Works. Many connecting threads can be drawn between the stunning 15-year retrospective currently exhibited in Heide III, and the works on show at Heide II. What centres the exhibition in Heide II is the enriching experience; the psychically charged and intellectually stimulating encounters it offers from a formidable clan of nine female and one male artist.
Strong themes, intrinsically related to Bourgeois, jump out from the works on show: the transformation of memory through art, the intense, feminine psychological motifs woven throughout the works, and the use of her work as a model for new works in a modern context.
Memory as an artistic device haunts the building in different guises. Personal memory, taking a leaf out of Bourgeois’ book, is utilised by Kathy Temin to poetically describe the material of her private life in sculpted form, in Large Orange Ball Tree. Contrastingly, Carolyn Eskdale’s approach is to reject personal memory and use the physical memory of the walls inside Heide II. Her careful scanning of traces from when Sunday and John Reed dwelt in the house adds a ghostly feel to the former laundry in her installation, Laundry Objects 2012.
Continuing the themes of memory and history, Joy Hester’s past, which intermingles with the Heide gallery story, collides with the present. Hung in the sunken living room of Heide II, her psychosomatic, stream-of-conscience ink drawings resonate with the past of the grounds; they could have been created in the living room of Heide I, or at least borne out of the coaxing letters between Sunday Reed and Hester.
Intensely psychological motifs punctuate the flow of the exhibition. Pat Brassington’s sly images, like the hanging phantom in House guest 2, 2007, and Brent Harris’s painted forms, which morph into sinister plotlines as they are being viewed, sink into the brain, deeper than words.
After Bourgeois, like many other greats, there are those artists who chose to continue the legacy of style and form that she pioneered while pushing these ideas into a modern context. Del Kathryn Barton, a self-proclaimed Bourgeois devotee, has used the works of the French-American artist as a stepping stone in her practise. In no other side 2012, a homage to Bourgeois’ Dawn, 2006, the elder artist’s influence in plainly visible in Barton web-like fabric drawings.
Bourgeois’ monumental oeuvre has undoubtedly touched many minds – those of artists, critics, and art appreciators. It is a rare delight to see an exhibition highlighting a carefully selected crop of Australian – predominantly female – artists, whose work is strongly linked with hers. Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists offers an opportunity to compare Bourgeois with her then-contemporaries, as well as with another generation of artists sharing similar ideas. A must see.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists
Curator: Linda Michael
Featuring works by Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Janet Burchill, Carolyn Eskdale, Brent Harris, Joy Hester, Kate Just, Patricia Piccinini, Heather B. Swann and Kathy Temin
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen
13 October 2012 – 14 April 2013
