Hans Bellmer – Louise Bourgeois.
Double Sexus April 24, 2010 - August 15, 2010
Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection

The sexually charged works of Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) show striking parallels, even though the artist never met: deformed bodies; missing or duplicated limbs; male and female sexual forms are separated from their physical context and merged with one another.

The exhibition “Bellmer-Bourgeois. “Double Sexus” puts over 70 sculptural, graphic and photographic works by the artist in dialogue with one another for the first time. In five sections, the female artist's view of the human body is contrasted with the male one. The focus is on traditional gender roles, sexuality and the surrealistic approach to it.

Hans Bellmer came from Berlin to Paris in 1938, where he joined the Surrealists and exhibited regularly with them. Louise Bourgeois studied art in Paris before moving to New York with her husband in 1938. There she maintained loose contact with some of the Surrealists living in exile.

With the “doll”, Hans Bellmer created the ideal woman in which his wishes and fantasies, but also secret, repressed fears, are reflected. Like a word from which new words, anagrams, arise by rearranging the letters, he took their members apart and put them together to form new bodies, staged and photographed them. These new bodies often have female and male characteristics at the same time. An ambiguity between genders arises, which also continues in Bellmer's drawings.

Louise Bourgeois also uses surrealist methods such as fragmentation or metamorphosis and adapts them for her own strategies. Her fabric-made, phallic-shaped Fragile Goddess (2002), which is by no means fragile, questions the conventional understanding of sexual identity and takes a skeptical look at the traditional image of women.

In addition to works from the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, the exhibition shows works from international collections as well as the Studio Louise Bourgeois.