Photo of Felix Harlan at Harlan & Weaver’s Canal Street studio
Photo of Maggie Wright
In Conversation: Printmaker Felix Harlan & The Easton Foundation's Maggie Wright on ‘Louise Bourgeois. Once there was a mother’
On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois. Once there was a mother’ at Hauser & Wirth’s newly dedicated Editions space, please join us for a talk about the artist and her printmaking practice with Harlan & Weaver’s Felix Harlan and The Easton Foundation’s Maggie Wright.
Celebrated for large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also an inventive and prolific printmaker, especially during the last decade of her life. Centered around one of her most powerful themes—motherhood and maternity—the exhibition places Bourgeois’s printed works in relation to sculptures and drawings to highlight the essential role printmaking played within her multifaceted practice. It is the first show to focus on Bourgeois’s prints since the 2017-18 MoMA exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,’ curated by Deborah Wye, who is also the editor of the online catalogue raisonné of Bourgeois’s prints and books.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended.
About Louise Bourgeois
Born in France in 1911 and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the past Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy and fear.
About Felix Harlan
Felix Harlan is a printer and owner of Harlan & Weaver, New York. Harlan graduated with a diploma in Art and Design from Hampshire College of Art, UK and MFA degree from Rutgers University, NJ in 1978 respectively. Together with his spouse Carol Weaver founded a fine art print publishing studio in 1984. Since then published and collaborated with some of the most celebrated contemporary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Stanley Whitney, James Siena, Kiki Smith and many more. Harlan continues to publish etching prints at the original studio on Canal Street in the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
About Maggie Wright
Maggie Wright has been the director of Louise Bourgeois’s foundation, The Easton Foundation, since 2018. She has worked for the foundation, with special focus on the Louise Bourgeois Archives, since 2009. Prior to this, she worked closely with Felix Harlan at Harlan & Weaver on a wide variety of print projects with Bourgeois and other artists. Wright received her BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 1996, and her MA in art history from Hunter College in 2004. She has also written extensively about artists and printmaking.
