Floor 6: Objects of Memory: QR Code 602
This QR code provides access to 11 artworks in this gallery.
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Objects in This Gallery
11 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Wall Text
1978
Paint and fiber on wood
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988
Wall Text
1988
Nickel and bronze
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1992
Wall Text
1978
Painted wood
Gift of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1980
Wall Text
1969
Lead, ed. 19/60
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
Wall Text
1969
Lead and mirror, ed. 19/60
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
Wall Text
1995, cast 1996
Bronze
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
Looming menacingly at over ten feet tall yet delicately balanced on its spindly legs,_ Spider _projects both strength and vulnerability. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Bourgeois created a number of bronze and steel spiders at various sizes, ranging from the intimate to the monumental. She was drawn to the creature in part because it reminded her of her mother, a master weaver who restored antique tapestries. Bourgeois regarded the female spider, like her mother, as clever, hardworking, and fiercely protective of her children. “If you bash into the web of a spider,” Bourgeois observed, “she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
Wall Text
1995
Steel
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995
Looming menacingly at over ten feet tall yet delicately balanced on its spindly legs,_ Spider _projects both strength and vulnerability. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Bourgeois created a number of bronze and steel spiders at various sizes, ranging from the intimate to the monumental. She was drawn to the creature in part because it reminded her of her mother, a master weaver who restored antique tapestries. Bourgeois regarded the female spider, like her mother, as clever, hardworking, and fiercely protective of her children. “If you bash into the web of a spider,” Bourgeois observed, “she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
Wall Text
1949, cast 1990
Painted bronze, edition 2/6
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
[These] pieces were presences—missed, badly missed presences. . _. . It was a tangible way of re-creating a missed past. —_Louise Bourgeois, 1976
These pillar-like structures belong to a group of approximately eighty works that Bourgeois called Personages. She carved the life-size sculptures in wood between 1945 and 1955 and later cast them in bronze. For Bourgeois, they were abstract surrogates for the family and friends that she left behind in France after emigrating to New York. Like individuals, each of the Personages has its own unique character and qualities: _Woman with Packages, _with its hanging forms, could be referencing the burdens of motherhood, while the spear-like shape of _Persistent Antagonism _suggests violence or perhaps isolation.
Wall Text
1946–48, cast 1989
Painted bronze, edition 1/6
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
These pillar-like structures belong to a group of approximately eighty works that Bourgeois called Personages. She carved the life-size sculptures in wood between 1945 and 1955 and later cast them in bronze. For Bourgeois, they were abstract surrogates for the family and friends that she left behind in France after emigrating to New York. Like individuals, each of the Personages has its own unique character and qualities: _Woman with Packages, _with its hanging forms, could be referencing the burdens of motherhood, while the spear-like shape of _Persistent Antagonism _suggests violence or perhaps isolation.
Wall Text
1996
Violins, violin bows, stones, and electric motor
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
Every few minutes a series of jarring wails is produced as automated arms move the bows of these two violins. The sculpture is related to several large-scale installations by Horn from the 1980s and 1990s featuring motorized violins or other instruments. In one permanent installation in Münster, Germany, mechanical hammers strike the walls of an abandoned tower that the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) used as a prison and execution site. Horn does not disclose where the masonry stones in this work came from, but there is the suggestion that the violins are giving voice to the traumatic memories of some site.
Wall Text
1983
Nails, steel, and wood
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990