Detail

The stela-like bronze sculpture, "Observer", is one of Louise Bourgeois’s early plastic works that she began to make in the mid-1940s in New York. The body, divided into head, torso and leg areas faces forward and, despite a high degree of abstraction, exhibits unequivocally anthropomorphic characteristics. The sculpture takes on the measurements of a standing human figure that is directly attached to the ground—without a plinth— and we encounter it as a direct vis-à-vis. The artist herself called these works Personnages, personalized entities, by which she could process her homesickness in America and her yearnings for her family. Louise Bourgeois said about them: “ they represent the people I left behind in France: my father, my brother, my cousins [...] I replicated my whole family”. In Bourgeois’s case this means the sculpture becomes a real person whom she misses, it becomes a fetish, a vehicle that conjures up their presence and through which the yearning is overcome. The artist described her work as exorcisms, a way for her to resolve emotional and personal conflicts by substitution. “These sculptures have nothing to do with sculpture,” said Bourgeois, “they signify direct bodily presence”.