Cell (Hands and Mirror)

Louise Bourgeois

1995

Marble, metal, and mirror

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

One of the most influential artists of the last century, Louise Bourgeois (Born 1911 in Paris; died 2010 in New York) has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore sexuality, the body, everyday life, and trauma. Cell (Hands and Mirror) is from a series of large-scale sculptures Bourgeois made when she was in her eighties. Each “cell” is a room that viewers are prompted to peer into, where they discover highly symbolic arrangements of sculptures and found objects. In Cell (Hands and Mirror) , the interior walls are painted blue, and two realis