Executed in 2005, Untitled is a remarkable example of Louise Bourgeois’ mature production. The artist’s connection to fabric can be traced back to her childhood years, as she grew up surrounded by the textiles of her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop in France. From the age of eight, she would often help them on weekends by drawing in the sections of the missing parts of fabric that were to be repaired, and, when she turned fifteen, she left her studies to officially join the family business. This early experience with textiles was the foundation of Bourgeois’ career as an artist, as she explained: “Stylistically the background is always the tapestries with which I grew up. I lived with them since I was born. It has to do with the stories. I am telling the same stories as the tapestries told, but with different.mes ans” (Louise Bourgeois).

From the mid-nineties, the artist turned to sewing as a form of art making, which she thought of as a symbol of repairing, and employed fabric as the core material, which she explored in both her sculpture and drawings. She took old clothes and other domestic effects, including tablecloths, napkins and bed linen, cut them up and re-stitched them to transform them into artworks. The result are fabric drawings which are abstract, yet highly personal, retaining the allusions to the previous life of her materials. Used and worn fabrics, imbued with memories, often sewn and washed by the hands of women, was the fitting means to address the themes recurrent throughout Bourgeois’ oeuvre.

In her two-dimensional fabric ‘drawings’, Bourgeois explored intricate geometries, creating abstract and heterogeneous works. Deconstructing the original garment from which the material is taken, she eliminates an overt reference to the body. These consist of layers of colour, texture and pattern, placed in careful juxtaposition, often very complex. Within them, the associations with Bourgeois’ biography are intertwined with the visual arrangement of the composition. The artist’s concerns remain recognisable, as patterns such as webs and spirals are those predominant in her works, re-envisaging the modernist grid.

In Untitled, the simplicity of form conceals a profound and heartfelt reference to the complicated relationship that Bourgeois had with her mother, as well as her complex relationship with the broader idea of motherhood. Sewing was indeed also a way for the artist to pay homage to her mother, whose exceptional sewing skills she greatly admired. The artist stitched pieces of fabric together to create an all-over composition with concentric shapes, recalling the contour of a spider-web. The edges of each piece of fabric lead to one point at the centre of the composition, from which a spiral-like movement seems to generate. The spiral itself was another motif which Bourgeois widely recurred to throughout her career, as symbolic of turbulence and vertigines.

For over seventy years, Louise Bourgeois transformed her thoughts and emotions into highly complex artworks, submitting her own psychic life to thorough analysis. She used her art as a way to process her feelings and trauma of the past, as a sort of catharsis. Drawing upon the artist’s childhood memory, Untitled hence stands as a great example of the artist’s ability to weave different threads of experience, feeling and thought into her work.