Last works from Louise Bourgeois wow in 'The Red Sky' at Hauser & Wirth

Her work could be as homey as a ball of blue yarn, as scary as a giant mother spider, as baffling as the engines of an alien star ship. Perhaps no artist ever had as long a career as Louise Bourgeois, who began drawing at age 11 to help restore the works that passed through her French parents’ tapestry repair shop.

She was still creating pictures 88 years later, at the time of her death in America. For decades between, she amazed the world (not just the art world) with her prodigious and singular sculptures and actinic lithographs.

What all her work had in common was its attempt to enter into her own psychology—as a woman, as a human, as an artist. When she emerged as a major modern artist in the middle of the last century, she stood apart first from the world of Abstract Expressionism, and then of nascent Pop. She was an idol of the '70s women’s movement, but denied she was a feminist. Bourgeois associated her art with her innermost psyche, a kind of personal "exorcism," stating: "Art is the guarantee of sanity."

Now, “Red Sky,” some of her final work on anchoring her inner stability, is on display at Hauser & Wirth in Downtown LA's Arts District.  It is an extraordinary experience.

In her ultimate regression from sculpture to the two-dimensional plane, Bourgeois concentrated all the sprawl and incantatory beguilement of her grand mid-period work into depictions invoking lifetime concerns and words of demonstrative power. They may be her last expressions, but they are, as art scholar Linda Nochlin once put it, “far from elegiac.” They are just as unsettling as such provocative earlier sculptural pieces as “Seven in the Bed” and “Destruction of the Father.” And after all, says Hauser & Wirth's Stacen Berg, printmaking was nothing new for her: "She first engaged with printmaking in the 1940s while raising three boys, when time and space to work were scant commodities."

The late works comprise six multi-panel presentations; the panels each six feet high and as much as 20 feet wide: Each work in the series begins with etchings with details added in other media, including watercolor, ink, gouache and fabric. And in writing of messages or instructions to herself.  “You can stand anything if you write it down,” she has said. These works show what she means.

The first of the series is the simplest. “Euphoria” (2009) consists of ovoid shapes, the first simply labeled "The Egg," then "The Cartesian Diver," "The Whirligig," and "The Spin the Spool Shuttle.” Each carries aspects of fertility and sexuality.

“Red Sky” is a rhapsody in red; more than 19 feet across, it is one of the most arresting of the works on show here. Bourgeois said that red is a color which she associates with depression, and “Sky” is supremely scarlet in ink, watercolor and colored pencil, whose red lines suggest variously jungle, water, small creatures, scrawls and landscape. The script is invocational:

The principal images of “The Fear is Inside You!!!” include a shower of vegetable pods and a heart-shaped object being pulled apart by a dozen hooks—suggesting the agony of divided affections.  The images of "Have a Little Courage” also include the hooked heart, plus others suggesting the feminine and fecundity. But the inscription of this tableau particularly underscores the profound worries of deep age: It is this “little’’ courage of Louise Bourgeois’ advanced years that is manifested in her powerful, still forward-looking final works.

"Louise Bourgeois: The Red Sky" is at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles (901 East 3rd St, LA CA 90013) through May 20, 2018.