Louise Bourgeois, Crouching Spider, 2003. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy: the artist, The Easton Foundation, New York, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Day and night, love and rage, calm and chaos, conscious and unconscious. Enter a world of emotional extremes in this exhibition of the art of Louise Bourgeois, one of the most influential artists of the past century.

Born in Paris in 1911 and living and working in New York until her death in 2010, Bourgeois is renowned for her fearless exploration of human relationships across a relentlessly inventive seven-decade career.

Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? reveals the extraordinary reach and intensity of her art, from her haunting Personage sculptures of the 1940s to her tough yet tender textile works of the 1990s and 2000s. It also reveals, as never before, the psychological tensions that powered her search, through a dramatic presentation in two contrasting exhibition spaces.

Moving from the white rooms of ‘Day’, on lower level 2 of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ North Building, to the darkened terrain of ‘Night’, downstairs in the Tank, viewers will encounter more than 120 works, including many never seen before in Australia, among them The Destruction of the Father 1974 and Crouching Spider 2003.

This exhibition, one of the most extensive ever dedicated to an international woman artist in Australia, is realised in close collaboration with The Easton Foundation, New York. An accompanying publication features contributions by filmmaker Jane Campion, author Chris Kraus, psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and curator Justin Paton, and writings by the artist selected by curator Philip Larratt-Smith.

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