Louise Bourgeois: Armed Forces

This is a unique and evocative collection of images chronicling the last year of acclaimed sculptor, Louise Bourgeois’ life. Louise Bourgeois was an immensely influential sculptor and one of the iconic figures of twentieth and early twenty-first century art. She died in May 2010, aged ninety-eight. In the last year of her life, she invited the artist Alex van Gelder to stay at her New York town house and photograph her. More than purely a portrait project, she considered the collaboration to be an extension of her work, allowing her person to be viewed as a segment of her art. Of the hundreds of pictures that van Gelder took, it is those which depict her hands against the black of her clothes that astonish most: gnarled, sinewy and wrinkled with age, they were the tools which produced her extraordinary work. This beautiful book presents twenty of Van Gelder’s portraits of Bourgeois’ hands, each on a double-page spread and accompanied by comments by the artist.