Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents Louise Bourgeois: Soft Landscape, on view from March 25th to June 21st, 2025. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition explores Bourgeois’s deep engagement with the relationship between the human body and landscape. This marks her second exhibition at the gallery and runs parallel to a major retrospective currently touring Asia.

Featuring works spanning the 1960s to 2010, Soft Landscape brings together recurring motifs in Bourgeois’s practice—nests, spirals, cavities, and flowing water—symbolizing themes of protection, time, and transformation. The show highlights key sculptural techniques she developed, such as hanging forms and relief compositions, oscillating between abstraction and figuration.

Among the highlights is the Lair series, created in the 1960s following a period of psychological introspection. These sculptural forms evoke places of retreat and self-reflection, embodying the tension between withdrawal and security. Also on view are a set of painted wood reliefs, repurposed from old transport crates, where Bourgeois merges landscape and biomorphic shapes within metal frames that enhance their sculptural presence.

The exhibition debuts Mamelles (1991, cast 2005), a striking bronze fountain featuring breast-like forms, from which water continuously flows—a poetic meditation on motherhood and the passage of time. Another notable work, Time (2004), consists of intricate drawings on music paper, where repetitive, wave-like gestures create a meditative rhythm, echoing the unconscious movements of the artist’s mind.

Making its Asian debut, Spider (2000) stands as one of Bourgeois’s most emblematic sculptures. Inspired by an ostrich egg, the piece explores the weight of maternal responsibility, with the spider serving both as an homage to her mother and a self-portrait of the artist herself.

With a selection of rarely exhibited works, Soft Landscape offers an intimate look at Bourgeois’s enduring exploration of memory, emotion, and the body’s connection to space.