Alex van Gelder: Louise Bourgeois, Armed Forces

Louise Bourgeois was an immensely influential sculptor and one of the iconic figures of twentieth and early twenty-first century art. She died in May 2010, aged ninety-eight. In the last year of her life, she invited the artist Alex van Gelder to stay at her New York town house and photograph her. More than purely a portrait project, she considered the collaboration to be an extension of her work, allowing her person to be viewed as a segment of her art. Of the hundreds of pictures that van Gelder took, it is those which depict her hands against the black of her clothes that astonish most: gnarled, sinewy and wrinkled with age, they were the tools which produced her extraordinary work. This beautiful book presents twenty of Van Gelder¿s portraits of Bourgeois¿s hands, each on a double-page spread and accompanied by comments by the artist.