Quote of the Day by Louise Bourgeois: "I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful."
(Image credit: Getty Images / Barbara Zanon) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Source: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which took the title of its 2024…
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(Image credit: Getty Images / Barbara Zanon) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Source: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which took the title of its 2024 Bourgeois retrospective from this work. The Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College also hold an edition and record of the text.Bourgeois took these words from a passage in her diary and embroidered them onto a handkerchief that belonged to her late husband, so you get a tiny, soft, very domestic bit of cloth carrying one of the blackest jokes in modern art. These days you can create something similar on the best Cricut machines, but here the original dates from 1996, and in 2007 Tate Modern put out a numbered edition of 1,000 in each of red, blue and pink to go with her retrospective, which goes a long way to explaining why you've probably seen the line on a tote bag or a gallery gift shop shelf without ever knowing where it came from.The joke works because of how she lived with her material. Her art grew out of a complicated and often traumatic childhood, and she spent decades turning that into work that could hold hope and fear, guilt and repair, tension and release all at once, so a sentence that says hell and wonderful in the same breath is pretty much her whole practice squeezed onto a hanky. Museums tend to read it as ambivalence and black humour, and I think that's right, since she never says the hell wasn't hell and never takes back the wonderful. The embroidered hankerchief, the original was made in 1996 but in 2007 Tate Modern created 1,000 numbered editions that now sell for £10,000 and more. (Image credit: Louise Bourgeois / Tate Modern)What I like about it as a line for anyone making things is that it has no attached lesson. Most of us want a rough patch to turn into something useful before we'll admit to it, and many inspirational messages in our Quote of the Day series have stories with a moral, leading to projects with a neat title, and Bourgeois just says it was wonderful, deadpan, and leaves you to work out what she means.So if you're making something out of a bad year and it hasn't resolved into anything yet, that's fine, and the gag you can finally crack about it in the margin of a sketchbook is a perfectly good place to start.Best Louise Bourgeois books: Hauser & Wirth Publishers Louise Bourgeois: the Insomnia Drawings Phaidon Press Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn't Sorry Skira Louise Bourgeois: the Fabric Works Want to explore the world of digital art?Our digital art newsletter is your go-to source for the latest news, trends, and inspiration from the worlds of art, illustration, 3D modelling, game design, animation, and beyond. TOPICS Ian Dean Editor, Digital Arts & 3D Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5. View More You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. Logout LATEST ARTICLES 1 Yes, Ted: The Animated Series looks like Family Guy, but that's perfect 2 One of Anycubic's best resin 3D printers has $230 off in Amazon's early Prime Day sale 3 Imagine spending $8.4 million on a Pokemon card 4 Vauxhall reveals "bold and pure" new logo design 5 It's International Coffee Day, and there's up to 50% off coffee makers at Amazon
