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Louise Bourgeois:
The Insomnia Drawings, edited by Daros Services, with texts by Marie-Laure
Bernadac and Elisabeth Bronfen.
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Louise Bourgeois: |
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Zürich: Daros; New York: Peter Blum Edition; Zürich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 2000. Bilingual edition in 2 volumes Standard edition, hard bound, in slipcase. Special edition of 1500 numbered copies, bound Special edition of 100 copies and 20 Artist’s Proofs with a bound-in, numbered and signed etching by Louise Bourgeois.
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Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings
Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs that inspire her work. The Insomnia Drawings show the artist's mind at work: drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the business of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman’s life and work: beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor.
As soon as the artist agreed to entrust The Insomnia Drawings to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services AG, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Laure Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places The Insomnia Drawings in the context of Bourgeois’ oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois’ imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. The second volume also contains a biography of the artist and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and
patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires
such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while her sleeplessness
prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings
and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water
that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what
prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings
states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question
of being suspended between two emotions—between plenitude and lack,
proximity and absence, inundation and deprivation, agreement and contradiction.
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