SCULPTURES BY LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Installation view
© The Easton Foundation
A special presentation in Gallery 293 brings together six sculptures by Louise Bourgeois that span the artist’s nearly 75-year career. From early works made of wood that evoke the body to architectural structures resembling cages and prison cells, her wide-ranging experiments in form examine the complexities of the human condition. The artist often referenced aspects of her own life in her work, such as her childhood in France and her role as a mother. Yet her sculptures transcend autobiography and engage themes of loss and loneliness, sex and mortality, trauma and fear.
On view in Gallery 293
Édouard Manet’s Woman with Fans
Woman with Fans, 1873
Édouard Manet
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, donation of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Rouart, 1930. RF 2850
On loan from the Musée d’Orsay through mid-May 2025, this painting by Édouard Manet depicts Nina de Callias, a popular figure in Paris’s artistic and bohemian circles. Despite the spontaneous impression that Manet’s loose, open brushwork might give, the artist carefully staged the scene in his studio to reflect his sitter’s unconventional character and taste. De Callias is dressed in a North African–style costume, which she often wore to receive guests. She reclines in front of a Japanese screen adorned with fans, a setup similar to the decor in her own home. But her expression is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the painting: Manet managed to capture the amusement, curiosity, and hint of distraction that defined her famously eccentric personality.
Remedios Varo’s Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitando)
Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitando), Remedios Varo’s last and largest painting, transforms the quietude of a traditional still life into a supernatural scene. Set in a Gothic tower, a table for eight begins to levitate. Above it, apples, peaches, pomegranates, and strawberries orbit like planets in a solar system.
The emergence of new life is a common theme of Varo’s work of the 1960s. Here, in addition to the seedlings sprouting up, the cloth itself seems animated. Everything flows into the vortex, except four mosquitos that look on warily as the fruits collide.
On view in Gallery 396
James Johnson’s Double Dip Model 2022–23
James P. Johnson ONN-ISS-KWAH
James Johnson, an artist and lifelong snowboarder, carved the wooden panel for this design with an image of Raven. In Tlingit belief, according to Johnson, Raven was light-colored in the beginning. But as the bird carried the sun in his beak through the sky, he flew across the smoke hole of a clan house and the soot turned him black, as this board depicts. Commercial products like this one allow Johnson to bring Tlingit art and culture to a global audience, and a portion of its sales were donated to building the new Sealaska Heritage Arts Campus in the artist’s hometown of Juneau, Alaska.
On view in Gallery 161
Learn more about this work in this Art Institute Short and hear from James Johnson in this article penned by the artist himself.
El Anatsui’s The Deluge
The Deluge, 2021
El Anatsui. Private collection
The Deluge, a loan from a private collection, presents a version of the Biblical flood. Near the top of the work, abstract shapes resemble clouds with blue lines of rain shooting down. Inspired in part by the graphic woven patterns of African cloths, Ghanaian artist El Anatsui uses recycled cans and other found aluminum to weave sculptural tapestries.
The repurposed objects bear traces of their initial use; as the artist has explained, they comprise “media which come with history, meaning, with something [that] means something to me. Not just oil paint from a tube. I can’t relate to that well. I would rather go for something people have used. Then there is a link between me and the other people who have touched that piece.”
On view in Griffin Court
Rhonda Holy Bear’s Lakota Honor
Lakota artist Rhonda Holy Bear sculpts characters whose narratives can be symbolically read through the many miniature objects she creates for them. This intricate work, inspired by the artist’s grandmother, Josephine Sees the Horses Woman, reimagines her as the proud wife of a courageous warrior killed in battle. To memorialize her husband, she wears his male-gendered regalia, including an extraordinary wapaha, or war bonnet, of eagle feathers, and carries his possessions—a stone war club, quilted bag, and red catlinite pipe. Sees the Horses Woman’s own accomplishments as a woman, wife, and mother are also shown through her belt of honors containing a knife sheath, awl case, hide scraper, and strike-a-light case. The sculpture displays some 32 different forms of Lakota art making, including beading, quillwork, hide tanning, feather work, wood carving, and metalwork.
On view in Gallery 136
Learn more with this Art Institute Short.
Hamo Thornycroft’s Teucer
This imposing bronze captures the moment just after the celebrated Greek archer Teucer shot an arrow at a Trojan adversary. His muscles are still tensed from drawing his bow, as he tracks the arrow’s path, hoping his aim was true.
Teucer was praised for its realism when it was first exhibited in London in 1881. Chicago collector and philanthropist George A. Armour, who owned a small replica of the composition, commissioned this full-scale bronze cast from the artist in 1891 and immediately gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was among the earliest modern European sculptures to enter the museum’s collection. The sculpture had long been on display in the museum’s Ryerson Library, but was deinstalled in May 2024 for much-needed conservation before being given this new deserving home across from Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic Sky above Clouds IV, at the intersection of Post-Impressionism and the Modern Wing.
On view in Gallery 249
Simone Leigh’s Sharifa
Simone Leigh
The nine-foot-tall Sharifa (2022) by Chicago-born artist Simone Leigh is what the artist has called “the first portrait I’ve ever done.” The subject is the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of Harlem Is Nowhere, a 2011 history of the storied neighborhood. She is also one of Leigh’s closest friends and a frequent participant in her projects.
The sculpture grew out of a video project Leigh produced for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in which she asked Rhodes-Pitts and others to recall and recreate their body position during childbirth. “Sharifa was just leaning against the wall, thinking, and that was the start of this sculpture,” Leigh has said. Though many of her sculptures use friends and colleagues as their subjects, before Sharifa, the artist had resisted calling them portraits. Rhodes-Pitts, as both a historian and a mother, embodies the labor of black women that Leigh has long centered in her work.
On view in the North Garden (corner of Michigan and Monroe)
Learn more about this work in this article.
