Louise Bourgeois
In and Out #2
1995-1996
aluminium
Louise
Bourgeois’s work in the garden of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum
Louise Bourgeois’s work
strikes me so often. It has given me insights that seem to have been achieved
by myself… It is quite complicated to put my finger on how influence by other
artists works, how it invades one’s image-thinking and its later growth. It is
more than evident that Bourgeois’s work and attitude influenced my sculptural
life by making me aware of the meaning and importance of making sculptures.
The way she used to live
and work amidst her works was firm support for the choices I have made to weave
my work and my life up until now. My first encounter with her work was in New
York by the end of the eighties. I saw many exhibitions in the Netherlands
afterward and other European countries. The second time that I visited New
York, in 1996, I found by happy coincidence a book called Entrails, Heads and
Tails, Photographic essays and conversations on the everyday with contemporary
artists, by Paola Igliori and Alstair Thain. The book contains photographs and
conversations with several artists about their daily working and living
environment.
It is still my most-beloved
book concerning Bourgeois. We see her work and other things in her house/studio
that comprises so many memories and histories. And that is really, I think, our
most vital correspondence, the love and attention for tactual things, matters
and materials, stuff, utensils, in short everything that one could use as one’s
companions, that represent certain values and that open up for attachment.
In the garden of the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I was recently – again – surprised by an aluminum
work of hers, that I had never seen before. The sculpture evokes memories of
many of her drawings.
Louise Bourgeois
In and Out #2
Another
view. It is a complex sculpture in which three forms hang and move slowly.
Louise Bourgeois
In and Out #2
Inside
detail
This work did conquer my
head instantly. It finally works as a sort of reference point for two
sculptures that I was currently working on in my studio and that were nearly
finished:
Hieke Luik
Fall no 3
2019
aluminium
Hieke Luik
Bell for C
2019
bronze
Getting over trauma’s in
her personal life was the main source of Bourgeois’s work. This does not
account for me in such an explicit and recognizable way, as we can read in
Laura van Grinsven's ‘Dialogue' in my 2016 book/catalogue Opnieuw Reset. Van
Grinsven described the relation between my life and work as follows:
Although the sculptures are
not portraits of Luik’s personal life, they cannot be imagined without the
person of the artist: the links of Links take on a different appearance
depending on her mood while making them.
Luik: ‘The works that I
made from “inner necessity,” without any external demand, communicate in the
first instance with myself. In those works I ask myself questions about my
working method: “Why do I want everything to look so clearly touched – with
fingerprints clearly visible? And why is there seldom a straight line to be
seen? …
An idea for a sculpture may
come to me quite suddenly: it is as if it comes from my back or somewhere at
the back of my head. A strong presence, but not yet clearly defined, it carries
within it the need to be made tangible. And then a process begins – a process
of foregrounding and highlighting. Finding a construction for something that
was not there before.’
Luik’s work is not
expressive. Rather, it possesses a physical and material intelligence. Each
work revolves around the desire to investigate and to find out answers. Within
the hands are the questions, the urgency, the subjects. The head is empty and
receptive to what is in the ‘back-brain’.
Hieke Luik (NL)
Links
2016
30
parts of bronze
In
the background: Adorant
1995
bronze
Hieke
Luik, August 2019
