Lacs de Montagne
Louise Bourgeois
American, born France. 1911–2010
1997
A color print—made with engraving, etching, aquatint, and drypoint—in which Louise Bourgeois turns mountain lakes into layered, ribbon-like folds that read as both landscape and fleshy enclosure around tiny schematic houses, conjuring memory and domestic intimacy.
You’re first arrested by sweeping bands of red and pink that swell, fold, and hollow into pale-blue pools, while small, spare house icons sit fragilely against the organic, almost bodily waves.
This late work shows how Bourgeois expanded printmaking’s expressive possibilities by translating her recurring motifs of bodies and houses into abstracted topographies that map psychological and familial histories.
Medium
Engraving, etching, aquatint, and drypoint
Dimensions
plate: 18 1/16 x 23 7/8" (45.9 x 60.6 cm); sheet: 23 13/16 x 29" (60.5 x 73.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the artist
Accession
11.2002
Palette
Exhibitions