The Kunstmuseum Basel is showing works by Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois in an exhibition. An augmented reality application rounds off the exhibition.

Jenny Holzer has worked in the Basel Art Museum curated an exhibition of works by her colleague Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010. The result of this star meeting is an approach to a body of work that seems to know no boundaries in terms of content or style.

The American conceptual artist became famous for her subversive and provocative text works. However, the text images and drawings are not by her, but by Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). But they were selected and placed by Holzer, who thus expresses her elective affinity.

Art of the most diverse kind

They are text images of the most diverse form and type and with the most diverse content: They are text passages embroidered on fabric pictures that testify to a great, intimate vulnerability. Absurd sayings carved into metal plates or subversive and political messages scrawled in pencil on watercolour paintings.

But this is only a small part of the almost limitless universe of Bourgeois' work: Among them are strangely amorphous yet figurative marble sculptures and hanging bodies made of fabric. Or bats made of metal, heads made of fabric, drawings, paintings, an eerie cave and much more. Only one spider, which has become the popular trademark of Bourgeois' work

As befits a performance by Jenny Holzer, the exhibition goes beyond the walls of the museum. Projections of writings will be seen on various building façades (including the town hall). Of course, the frieze of lettering on the new building of the Kunstmuseum Basel will also be played.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS XX Augmented Reality App

Jenny Holzer, together with the digital agency Holition (London), has also developed the AR app that transforms Louise Bourgeois' key work Destruction of the Father (1974), shown in the Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau, into an unforgettable experience for the senses. The app also allows visitors to take selected words by Bourgeois with them wherever they go, to float their words and to create and share their own AR images.

The app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store (iPhone) and in the Google Play Store (Android) can be downloaded.

The exhibition "Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer - The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page" runs until 15 May.

Source: Nau / Kunstmuseum Basel