Fittingly–following the week when more than one million people around the world marched for women’s rights–Sotheby’s is to host a joint exhibition of two of the greatest female artists of the 20th century: Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama.
Traumata, which opens at the auction house’s private-selling gallery, S|2, in London on 24 February (until 13 April), will bring together sculptures, paintings and works on paper by Bourgeois and Kusama in a bid to tease out the parallels between their very different, but aligned practices.
Both women left their home countries to live in New York–Bourgeois in 1938 and Kusama exactly 20 years later (although she returned to Japan in 1973)–building careers amid the city’s famously macho art scene. The cultural displacement felt by both women as émigrés influenced their earliest major works. Bourgeois created her Personages, portable totem-like sculptures that represented the family members she left behind in Paris, while Kusama’s earliest Infinity Net paintings recall her voyage across the Pacific Ocean to New York. Examples of both go on display in the Sotheby’s exhibition.
Other sections of the show focus on works created in response to the complicated relationships both artists had with their mothers, their struggles with mental illness and the crossover between sex and violence. “One of the really striking things that bridges them is this obsessive repetition in their work,” says Emma Baker who has co-organised the exhibition with Marina Ruiz Colomer, her fellow contemporary specialist at Sotheby’s.
It is not the first exhibition to unite Bourgeois and Kusama, however. In 2001, the New York dealer Peter Blum held a show in his SoHo gallery, but it centred on “mark-making and the very physical aspects of their work”, Baker says. “Ours is the first to focus on the psychological aspects of these artists’ practices and to look at them under the aegis of trauma.”
Baker does not wish to give prices for the works in the show; around half have been loaned by private foundations, while the rest are for sale. For an indication of prices, however, both artists have works coming up in the contemporary evening sale on 8 March, which coincidentally falls on International Women’s Day. A 2003 vitrine by Bourgeois is estimated to sell for £800,000 to £1.2m and an Infinity Net canvas painted by Kusama in 2007 is expected to go for between £500,000 and £700,000. Bourgeois holds the record for the most expensive sculpture by a woman to be sold at auction ($28.2m for a nine-foot bronze Spider work).
Isabelle Paagman, the European head of private sales at Sotheby’s, says the auction house is making a conscious effort to redress the gender imbalance in the art market. “Our commitment and dedication to giving female artists prominence at auction is something that we would like to work on long-term. It’s not just flavour of the month,” she says.
