THIS exhibition, presumably the gallery's final one for 1996, is surely its best as well. It is not large as numbers go, and the Douglas Hyde's rather odd format hardly allows for mounting many sculptures; but there is still enough to encapsulate the essence of a remarkable career, which began relatively late and has not ended yet.
A group of early works shows how far the artist has travelled since then. "Early" means the late 1940s, when Bourgeois was already well in her 30s, and the four pieces - one in wood, the others in bronze - are not typical of her maturity, though still good of their kind. They are all narrow, tall, totem like works which show some debt to Brancusi and early Giacometti, and also (I should guess) African sculpture.
The mature Bourgeois is sui generis, and also very various, even unpredictable - in fact, it becomes difficult to speak of a "style", although her work is usually recognisable straightaway as hers and nobody else's. This is, simply, because her innate personality is such a strong one, which spills through diverse concepts and forms. The big steel Spider dominates the room, spindly and malevolent, a nightmare turned real. The wall piece Mamelles is made, from rubber, and the multiple breasts express that edgy sexuality in Bourgeois's works which is something more, or less, than erotic - has it to do with a peculiar feminine mood of self questioning and self regard which seems somehow endemic in our age?
The two Soft Landscapes suggest some give and take from Claes Oldenburg and the New York ambience of 20 years ago, though the emotional mood is very different. Janus Fleur, a hanging piece in bronze, seems to join male and female sexual features in a manner which suggests discord, rather than concord. An untitled stone (or marble?) piece on the floor bristles characteristically with what could be both fungoid growths and male organs. It expresses both fecundity and decay.
What with wall sculptures, hanging, standing and lie on the floor pieces, it is plain that the artist cares little about classical equilibrium or the balanced harmony of traditional, free standing bronzes. She is, in fact, a very un classical sculptor, closer to Germaine Richier and even the Surrealists than she is to, say, Maillol with his weighty equipoise and calm. If taxed with inconsistency, she might reply as Picasso did when critics reproached him with not having a constant style: "But God has no style!" You can afford to forget about such matters as long as you have genius and abundant ideas, both of which plainly Louise Bourgeois had.
