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Three Horizontals
Louise Bourgeois American
Not on view
The malleable, sensual forms of Three Horizontals depict the female body as evolutionary, with the potential to adapt and withstand trauma. A powerful example of Bourgeois’s fabric sculptures, the carapace of each form is cocooned in fleshy pink fabric that is stuffed and stitched, sometimes bursting at the seams. It is as if the dynamism of the body exceeds its physical limits. Bourgeois described horizontality as "the desire to abandon all, to sleep," and these supine, armless figures embody this precarious state of being. Psychologically complex, the work can also be seen as a feminist response to the metamorphosis of the female sculpted body: here, the body bears the marks of painful transformation as it expands or contracts.
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