For over 80 years, Louise Bourgeois probed the psychological depths of her own lived experience to create art that was as radical as it was deeply personal. Exploring themes of domesticity, sexuality, and mortality, Bourgeois approached art making as a therapeutic process to confront her own troubled childhood memories.

Executed in 2010, the year of Bourgeois’s passing, Spiral is an exquisite gouache that speaks to the artist’s over six decade-long exploration of the symbolic form of the spiral. ‘The spiral is important to me,’ she once stated. ‘As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them…The spiral – I love the Spiral – represents control and freedom’ (Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Paul Gardner, Louise Bourgeois, New York, 1994, p. 68). Bourgeois here saturates the sheet in her favoured colour of red, employed to represent the extremes of the human condition and heighten the symbolism of the cycle of life that the spiral alludes to.

In the last decade of Bourgeois’s life, her so-called fabric “drawings” became a central focus of her practice. In Untitled, 2006, Bourgeois has assembled the form of a spiral by cutting up and re-stitching fabrics found in her own personal collection of old clothes and household items such as tablecloths, napkins or bed linen accrued over deacdes. For Bourgeois, who grew up helping in her parent’s tapestry restoration workshop, fabric and the act of sewing held immense personal significance: ‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’ (Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Aller-Retour: Zeichnungen und Skulpturen, Nuremberg, 2005, p. 201).