Lousie Bourgeois: The Fabric Works at Hauser & Wirth

Entry: Free

This was the first time I'd been to Hauser & Wirth London and I spent some time wandering around and puzzling over the fact that the works that I'd seen on promotional material for the exhibition weren't on show. For anybody else going to Hauser & Wirth for the first time, don't be like me – find out in advance that Hauser & Wirth has two galleries and they have separate street entrances!

This exhibition collects “fabric drawings” made by Lousie Bourgeois between 2002 and 2008, and several large sculptures, including one of her huge metal spiders, (Crouching Spider, 2003). The fabric drawings are abstract pieces made by sewing and/or weaving pieces of fabric into squares or rectangles that are then framed. Apparently the fabric came from clothes and household linen that Bourgeois had collected throughout her life making these pieces an autobiography of sorts, one that only she could read.

Sadly, the intensely personal nature of the materials renders the drawings quite frustrating. While the fabric presumably held some significance to Bourgeois, all it can offer to a stranger is colour, pattern and texture. Unsurprisingly, the pieces that had the most impact for me were the ones in the North Gallery that used patterns and textures to greater effect. Here Bourgeois had utilised the stripes on fabrics to create geometric shapes and sewn three-dimensional structures onto some of the pieces. These were amazing – bulbous shapes made from net and muslin rising from highly-textured backgrounds and optical illusion-esque polygons formed by striped material that had been cut up and then reassembled. By comparison the simpler pieces, small coloured squares made from other small coloured squares, lacked interest. (I also expected all of the fabric drawings to be a lot bigger than they were.)

I've not seen enough of Bourgeois' work to be able to say if this exhibition did it justice. I suspect it didn't; while some of it was compelling, an equal amount was quite bland. Even though I enjoyed the fabric pieces in the North Gallery they were overshadowed by the spider, which was tall enough for me to walk under its legs, and which made it clear to me why Bourgeois was so well-known for her arachnid creations.