QMA Gallery Layout & Room Description

Room 1.
The show opens with this Cell because it establishes the centrality of time in Bourgeois's work. The two strands of water emanating from the top merge in a single stream that winds around the mound, which is shaped like a figure eight, the sign of infinity. Freud held that the unconscious mind was timeless, and yet the flow of the stream is a direct metaphor for the passage of time.

Room 2.
Here the two aluminum spirals symbolize hanging nests. The spiral has two directions: it turns in on itself and out to the world. The idea of the nest—of tranquility, peace, and protection—resonates with the house on the hand-pose in pink marble, where two pairs of clasped hands express Bourgeois's desire for reconciliation and her fear of separation. Bourgeois's early family life was difficult and unhappy; as a defense against the anxieties that sprang from this trauma, her work contains many images of her need to recreate the home as a place of refuge.

Room 3.
This room contains two sculptures from Bourgeois's early series of Personages. These sculptures are symbolic substitutes for people she left behind in France when she emigrated to the US in 1938. Although they are abstract, their symmetry and verticality reference the human body. In Quarantania, top-heavy forms represent the artist's loneliness and fragile mental state in her early years in America.