Hans Bellmer / Louise Bourgeois

Bodies distort, breaking down. Forms of male and female genitals fuse with one another. Male bodies become fetishes, with missing members; others are doubled and androgynous bodies result. The sexually charged works of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer reveal remarkable parallels, even though the artists never actually met: Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) lived in Paris until 1938, where she studied art, then she went to New York, where her career as an artist began. There she maintained loose contacts to several of the Surrealists living in exile. Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) moved from Berlin to Paris in 1938, where he joined the Surrealists and regularly exhibited with them.