Louise
Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Packaging

The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois first experienced insomnia in 1939. Throughout her life, she would suffer from the condition. However, in her long waking nights she was also highly productive. She created The Insomnia Drawings during a particular bout with the disorder. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she produced a series of 220 sheets with drawings, sketches and poetic annotations. Combining abstract and geometric elements with realism and figuration, the drawings reflect Bourgeois’ complicity with sleeplessness, and speak of her memories and thoughts.

In 2015, we created the packaging for a small edition of pillowcases made by Hauser & Wirth after one of Bourgeois’s drawings from 2009, “Maman”. The pillowcase is delicately held by red wrapping paper in a box, also red, on which an excerpt from Bourgeois’s diaries is foiled in the same colour. The packaging creates a subtle unpacking experience, thanks notably to the tone-on-tone palette, which underlines the depth of colours in Bourgeois’s original drawing.

2015