In Spring 2022, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) curated an exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists of the past century. Holzer is internationally renowned for her exploration and subversion of public language through the use of nontraditional forms, from street signs and T-shirts to projections and LEDs. Bourgeois’s psychologically charged work deals with the realm of human emotion: love, desire, dependency, sexuality, rejection, jealousy, and abandonment. In an unprecedented encounter between two giants of American art, the Kunstmuseum Basel presented Bourgeois’s work as seen through Holzer’s eyes.

Holzer approached Bourgeois’s art through the lens of her extensive writing: Bourgeois’s vast archive ranges from decades of diaries and letters to several hundred psychoanalytic writings, and she frequently incorporated the written word into her art. The resulting exhibition, Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer, inspired this exclusive edition for which Holzer collaborated with fashion designer Gabriela Hearst. Custom silk pajama sets in red and white are each embroidered with a Bourgeois text fragment selected by Holzer:

Holzer on the selected writings by Louise Bourgeois for this limited edition:
MAGIC CANNOT BE STOLEN from a loose sheet of writing, August 1991 (LB-0007)
Holzer: “BOURGEOIS IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.”

THE RAGE TO KNOW from an embroidered textile from Cell I, 1991
Holzer: “BOURGEOIS KNEW, AND RAGED EXQUISITELY.”

Gabriela Hearst on the collaboration:
“This collaboration was a true honor. The luck to serve in this gesture of two artists’ work that I admire so deeply. The incredible privilege to peep into the closeness of the relationship of Jenny Holzer and the late Louise Bourgeois.”

# / #

The American artist Shirley Jaffe was born in New Jersey in 1923 and went to Paris in 1949, where she remained until the end of her life in 2016. In the course of her productive career as a painter, Jaffe developed her very own formal language.
The beginnings of her work around 1950 were marked by Abstract Expressionism, a polyphonic artistic movement that established itself in the USA after the Second World War. She executes her large-format paintings in quick, spontaneous brushstrokes. In the 1960s, Jaffe turned away from this now established movement and sought new impulses. From then on, she worked out the structure of her paintings with bright colors. Around 1968 she dared to take an even more radical step: clearly defined surfaces, calligraphic lines and a variety of colours found their way into her paintings. A new phase began in the 1980s when Jaffe explored the potential of the colour white to add tension to her precise, geometric compositions. From this later phase, the Kunstmuseum Basel, together with the artist's estate and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, has selected two works on paper for an exclusive edition. On paper, Jaffe worked with watercolor, gouache, oil crayon, vinyl paint, and other materials. The artist experimented freely with the composition and with color and light conditions. Jaffe emphasized that on paper she follows a different logic and can work much faster and more spontaneously. The artist was interested in the technique of screen printing, which was also used for our edition. She was particularly interested in the controlled process of translating colors and the collaborative aspect of this activity

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1949 and came to Basel with her family at the age of thirteen. Here she studied painting at the then School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited regularly as a young artist. In 1982, she settled in Panajachel, Guatemala. Since then, she has made motif references to her subtropical environment in her works.
The forces and structures of Guatemala's subtropical nature, together with the artist's painterly gesture, are the driving force behind her paintings. When tropical storm Agatha flooded her camp with mud in 2010, Suter decided to leave these traces of nature as part of her paintings. She allows moisture, light, flora and fauna to become part of her painting. In her presentations, she also installs the canvases close together so that they overlap each other. Visitors thus walk through Suter's painting and immerse themselves in an atmospherically dense work of shapes, colors and traces of the weather.
The Edition Vivian Suter – Untitled (excerpt) was created in close cooperation with the traditional textile company Jakob Schlaepfer, St. Gallen. Produced in an exclusive edition of 25 pieces, the Edition combines Vivian Suter's colour power with high-quality materials.