This summer, Rome’s world-famous Galleria Borghese brings key sculptures from Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre into dialogue with the museum’s collection of ancient Roman art, Bernini and Canova sculptures, Caravaggio, Titian and Raphael paintings, and the villa’s own 17th-century grandeur. At the centre of the magnificent entrance hall, famous for its sumptuous Mariano Rossi ceiling fresco, stands an imposing metal cell by Bourgeois entitled The Last Climb. It is one of the artist’s last cells, created in 2008, just two years before her passing.
Here, themes of mortality and ascension to a heaven beyond come into dialogue with Rossi’s neoclassical motifs, while other objects in the sombre circular cell serve as a self-portrait: the artist salvaged the metal staircase spiralling towards the skies from her former Brooklyn studio. Meanwhile, the barely perceivable threads running across the cell and its blue glass orbs are a reference to her mother, and her parents’ tapestry business.
