Arch of Hysteria

Narrator

Carrara. Italy. 1969. Louise Bourgeois meets Alina Szapocznikow. Big bellies, tits, impotence, and male hysteria.

Elin-Therese Aarseth

Carrara was a fashionable meeting place for contemporary artists from around the world. It is surrounded by mountains with white marble, and the marble from these mountains is greatly sought after for sculpture work.

Narrator

This is Elin-Therese Aarseth, art historian at the national museum.

Elin-Therese Aarseth

The two artists immediately became close. Szapocznikow introduced Bourgeois to friends, such as Roman Polanski and the polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. She also gave Bourgeois two of her coloured polyester resin lamps as a present, and Bourgeois returned the gesture of friendship by sending Szapocznikow a gold patina version of her sculpture Sleep looking like a “sleeping penis”.

Narrator

It was not only the shared situation of being female sculptors in an almost completely male dominated scene that brought them together, but moreover their interest in similar artistic questions.

Elin-Therese Aarseth

It seems like a lucky coincidence that Szapocznikow also experimented with casting and colouring different synthetic substances such as plastic materials. The body in its most erotic as well as despicable forms was central to both artists at the time.

Bourgeois’ work Arch of Hysteria from 1993—a full body cast of her assistant and confidant Jerry Gorovoy in an extreme backbend, could be a reference to Szapocznikow’s Piotr. The sculpture is a life size cast of her adopted son, bending his head and chest backwards, eyes closed as if in ecstasy.