Though Hauser and Wirth Gallery’s current exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois focuses on the late artist’s abstract sculpture, many pieces incorporate found objects or include an element of representation that gives each work an extra charge. Viewers first encounter a darkened gallery dominated by a metal submarine-like shape in two parts – one moving slowly in an out of the other on rails – meant to evoke mother/child dependency. Less unnerving but still pointing to the female body, one of the artist’s Poids sculptures features a humerously minimal assemblage of curving forms – a tire and two liquid-filled glass bowls positioned on an arched steel rod – that suggest a stooped, subservient form. Here, an untitled pink marble sculpture offers another spherical shape, this one with a chubby arm emerging from one side as if breaking out into independent life. (On view in Chelsea through April 18th).
