Recursions - Viewing Room

Throughout her career, Louise Bourgeois explored themes such as domesticity, family, the body, sexuality, memory, and childhood trauma, developing a highly personal visual language rooted in the subconscious and the reactivation of early memories.

Delicately oblique in tone, Untitled (The Wedges) brings together the refined yet unsettling visual language that is central to the development of Louise Bourgeois’s practice. Abstraction functioned as a means of both perceiving and working through emotions, which deeply shaped the trajectory of her work. When describing her linear hatching, as well as her totemic forms and shapes, she often used terms such as “caressing” or “soothing,” as if her gestures were directly attuned to her shifting inner states and emotional fluctuations.

In Louise Bourgeois’s fabric works, stitching operates as a central gesture through which form is repeatedly made and unmade, holding the body together while simultaneously exposing its fragility through seams and repairs.

Paulina Peavy was born in 1901 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She lived and worked in New York from 1943 until close to the end of her life.

Handmade masks were used during painting sessions to facilitate deeper trance states, while her Phantasma series of drawings presented the generative power of women in aural, concentric color fields. In Peavy, recursiveness takes the form of successive revelations.

She wore these masks during public appearances, including interviews on the Long John Nebel radio show in the late 1950s, where she remained in trance while Lacamo spoke through her. The intelligence speaking through Paulina Peavy said:

Throughout the 1980s Christopher Wool’s emphasis on process increased as he created allover paintings that shied away from specific subject matter and form.

If in Christopher Wool's work, patterns emerge through a logic of copy and disruption, with Rebecca Watson Horn shapes appear in a process of writing and erasure.

Bob Smith’s boxes function as intimate architectures in which memories and fragments of urban debris into theatrical mental landscapes.

Made from abandoned drawers scavenged in the declining New York of the 80s, his constructions transform found materials into containers of lived experience and cultural residue.

In Emily Sundblad’s tapestry, motifs return through successive acts of translation.

Flowers appear recurrently from work to work, reflecting painting’s ability to generate new forms from its own material activity. It is an engagement with the possibilities of medium itself, where repetition becomes a source of transformation.