Untitled (Undulating Ribbon)

Bourgeois studied mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne.  Her artwork is full of geometric and organic shapes used as metaphors for human emotion.  While most might attribute a line that looks like a ribbon to a decorative frill, such was not the case with Bourgeois’s curvy lines.  She participated in psychoanalysis for three decades – and in that discipline “repetition compulsion” is the unconscious urge to re-enact painful events or patterns in an attempt to gain control over them, or even rewrite the outcome of a past trauma.  The form in this work manifests a thought loop or memory that she could not escape.  And it is created in two of her favored colors: bold red and soft blue.