Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal

From August 30, 2025, to January 4, 2026, Hoam Museum of Art, operated by Samsung Foundation of Culture, will present Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal. This exhibition marks the artist’s first museum-level solo presentation in Korea in twenty-five years and brings together more than 110 works drawn from all periods of her extraordinary career.

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris; d. 2010, New York) is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the past century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her seven-decade career—including installation, performance, drawing, painting, and printmaking—she is best known as a sculptor. From poetic drawings to room-sized installations, Bourgeois physically manifested her anxieties in order to exorcise them. Memory, love, fear, and abandonment are at the core of her complex and celebrated oeuvre.

The title of the exhibition, taken from Bourgeois’s own writing, situates her work within the tensions between mother and father, conscious and unconscious, masculine and feminine. The forms and narratives that recur throughout her oeuvre are rooted in her complex relationships with her parents. Her mother—both protector and rival—and her father—a figure of longing and conflict—shaped the psychic structures that underpin her artistic vocabulary.

The exhibition traces Bourgeois’s artistic journey from her early paintings and the iconic Personages sculptures of the 1940s, to the architectural environments called Cells from the 1990s, and finally to her late fabric works of fragility and reparation and her late gouache suites. Her art embodies striking dualities: organic and geometric, abstract and figurative, interior and exterior, soft and hard. The motif of the couple emerges as the ultimate expression of Bourgeois’s desire to reconcile warring opposites in an idealized unity.

Highlights include Destruction of the Father (1974), a lurid installation staging an imagined act of revenge against a domineering father figure; Janus Fleuri (1968), a bronze sculpture merging male and female forms; Red Room (Parents) (1993), one of the most important of the Cells; and Cell (Black Days) (2006), a powerful condensation of melancholia and sexuality.

The dynamic interplay between binary oppositions in Bourgeois’s work is incarnated in the exhibition itself, which is staged across two floors. The lower floor represents rationality, order, and the conscious mind, unfolding in a linear narrative. The upper floor, in which the viewer is free to walk in various directions, stands for unreason, emotional intensity, and the unconscious. Darker rooms punctuate the downstairs display with irruptions of vulnerability, melancholia, jealousy, and aggression, while lighter rooms upstairs provide moments of respite within an immersive environment.

A distinctive feature of the exhibition is the centrality of Bourgeois’s writings—diaries, loose sheets, and other texts produced over the course of her long life. For this exhibition, American Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has created light projections using excerpts from Bourgeois’s writings.

Organized in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, the exhibition follows acclaimed presentations in Sydney, Tokyo, and Taipei, and concludes its Asia Pacific tour at Hoam Museum of Art. Set within the museum’s architecture and traditional garden, Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal offers audiences in Korea a rare opportunity to encounter one of the most significant artists of our time in a unique context.

Press contact, Jooyeon Han, (Communication Team kate.han@samsung.com)