When Tracey Emin first met Louise Bourgeois, the first thing she noticed were her strong and muscular hands. The second thing was her breasts. “She had these giant breasts, absolutely giant, and so did I,” the UK artist wrote for the Evening Standard in 2022. “We were these two women, sitting at this table with our giant breasts, it really struck me, it was so strange.”
The pair became fast friends, and collaborated at the end of Bourgeois’ life on a series of prints called Do Not Abandon Me (2009-2010). First, Bourgeois had sent Emin a number of watercolours of pink swollen bellies, veiny, blackened mounds, and abstract male figures, with prominent erections, in silhouette. Two years later, when Emin had finally worked up the courage, she scrawled in ink her own additions, filled with her mordant humour and sincere sensuality.
On top of Bourgeois’ watercolours of erect penises, she drew Jesus on the cross, a tiny woman crawling on all fours, and even a figure committing suicide by hanging herself off the sex’s tip. Then there was Emin’s large childlike text about loss, love and flesh.
The title of the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) new exhibition, Deep Inside My Heart, is taken from one of Emin’s scribbles. The exhibit, a single room featuring 39 works, zeroes in on women artists of the 20th century who have consumed themselves with questions of the body, and is a chance to show off a number of the gallery’s most recent acquisitions – including Do Not Abandon Me. (An unrelated major Bourgeois retrospective is now showing in Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW.)
The show is part of the NGA’s Know My Name initiative, which aims to bring more gender parity to the gallery’s walls and their permanent collection. “We have great key holdings of great women artists, like Eva Hesse and Sonia Delaunay, you know, great modernists … but it could be more even,” says Lucina Ward, the NGA’s curator of international art. “And we have this big gap, weirdly in the 1990s.”
Concerns of the body have long been a focus ofwomen’s art, but in the west during the 80s, the theme dominated sculpture, performance, painting and photography. Much of Deep Inside My Heart involves the work of acclaimed artists whose careers first took root in this era – an era in which bodily autonomy was defined by losses and gains. The sexual revolution had run its course and, in many ways, failed to deliver lasting liberation, particularly for marginalised communities; and the Aids epidemic had suffocated sexual freedom, and laid bare the wilful failure of governments to act.
As Ward says, this was a period of upheaval, in which minimalist or abstract bodily forms in art would not do, and “a more direct language was necessary”. Decades later, these works remain formidable, holding critique, comedy and possibility for our own age of disease and thwarted freedoms.
The exhibition includes works from German American artist Kiki Smith, covering three distinct periods of her oeuvre. The most recent are her large tapestries, Earth, Underground and Sky (2012), in which a female nude is enmeshed with the fecundity of the earth; all winding tree branches, snakes and marbled pebbles. The triptych seems to offer an image of Eve in redux – without the tortures of sin. Instead, Eve tangles cheerfully with nature and enjoys the privilege of being all-seeing; adorned with eyes attached to her thighs.
These folkloric elements stretch to Smith’s large-scale drawings, where feet and spindly figures seem as if they might crack and crumple like their delicate paper canvases. Something more solid, but no more less ragged, is found in Smith’s 1993 sculpture Untitled III (Upside-down Body with Beads). Translucent beads stretch out across the floor like DNA, surrounding a messily cast bronze figure crouching down; here, the body is rendered unruly, but also rough-hewn, a site which forever bears the fractures of labour and calamity.
Flesh – decayed, breached and abandoned – was never far from Smith’s mind. In the 80s, she studied as an emergency medical technician and witnessed her sister and friends succumb to premature deaths due to Aids-related complications.
Elsewhere, the body is rendered more playfully mutable. Lynda Benglis’ rust-coloured Untitled (Polly’s Pie II) sits on the floor of the gallery, a sloppy pile of coagulated polyurethane foam (part of her series of “fallen paintings”), which has resided in the NGA’s collection for decades.
“Benglis is very much interested in the machismo of the gesture [in art]. She takes the gesture and says, ‘Well, look, I’m going to make a gestural painting, but without the canvas and without the stretcher, and it’s just going to sit on the floor and be there,’” says Ward.
Polly’s Pie serves as a kind of companion to the work of Indonesian painter I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, where legs and necks are twisted and stretched to comic, carnal extremes, poking fun at the foibles inherent to desire and the limits placed on women’s sexuality.
“The idea of body parts, dis-bodied bodies is so key to all these artists,” says Ward. “The show [asks] what happens internally within a body – both in a mimetic or imaginary or muscle memory sense – but also, what happens to the body when it can’t be self-contained?”
Among work from other esteemed international artists (such as Sarah Lucas, Marlene Dumas, Ana Mendieta and Nancy Spero) is a dedicated space for the early works of Australian sculptor Bronwyn Oliver, known for her mesh-like metal sculptures. The collection on show here was made while she was studying at the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1984.
These are beguiling, unnerving objects that look like long-lost artefacts of an extinct species; skeletal, shell-like and fanged. “I set out to strip the ideas and associations down to (physically and metaphorically) just the bones,” she once said of her practice, “exposing the life still held inside”.
Deep Inside My Heart is open at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until May 2024. Guardian Australia travelled to Canberra as a guest of the NGA
