When Tracey Emin first met Louise Bourgeois, the first thing she noticed was her strong and muscular hands. The second thing was her breasts. “She had gigantic breasts, absolutely gigantic, and so did I,” the British artist wrote for The Evening Standard in 2022. “We were these two women sitting at this table with our huge breasts, it really struck me, it was so strange.”
Related: Nightmarish, playful, erotic: art titan Louise Bourgeois’ revelatory Sydney show
The pair became fast friends and, towards the end of Bourgeois’ life, collaborated on a series of prints called Do Not Abandon Me (2009-2010). First, Bourgeois had sent Emin a number of watercolors of pink swollen bellies, veined, blackened hills and abstract male figures, with prominent erections, in silhouette. Two years later, when Emin finally gathered the courage, she scribbled in ink her own additions, filled with her biting humor and genuine sensuality.
On top of Bourgeois’s watercolors of erect penises, she drew Jesus on the cross, a small woman crawling on her hands and knees, and even a figure who commits suicide by hanging herself from the end of the sex. Then there was Emin’s great childish 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 exhibition, a single room with 39 works, focuses on 20th century female artists who have found themselves consumed with questions about the body, and is a chance to show off some of the gallery’s most recent acquisitions – including Don Not Abandon Me. (An unrelated major Bourgeois retrospective is now on view in Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW.)
The show is part of the NGA’s Know My Name initiative, which aims to bring greater gender equality to the gallery’s walls and their permanent collection. “We have major key positions in great women artists, like Eva Hesse and Sonia Delaunay, you know, great modernists… but it could be even more even,” says Lucina Ward, curator of international art at the NGA. “And we have a big gap, strangely enough in the 1990s.”
Concerns about the body have long been a focus in women’s art, but in the West in the 1980s the theme of sculpture, performance, painting and photography dominated. Much of Deep Inside My Heart includes 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, especially for marginalized communities; and the AIDS epidemic had stifled sexual freedom and exposed the willful failure of governments to act.
As Ward says, this was a period of unrest, when minimalist or abstract body shapes in art would not suffice, and ‘a more direct language was necessary’. Decades later, these works remain formidable, offering criticism, comedy, and potential for our own age of disease and thwarted freedoms.
The exhibition features work by German-American artist Kiki Smith, covering three different periods of her oeuvre. The most recent are her large tapestries Earth, Underground and Sky (2012), in which a female nude becomes entangled in the fertility 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 happily becomes involved in nature and enjoys the privilege of being all-seeing; decorated with eyes on her thighs.
These folkloric elements extend to Smith’s large-scale drawings, where feet and spindly figures appear to crack and crumple like their delicate paper canvases. Something sturdier, but no less frayed, is found in Smith’s sculpture Untitled III (Upside Down Body with Beads) from 1993. Translucent beads stretch across the floor like DNA and surround a carelessly cast bronze figure sitting on his knees; here the body is made unruly, but also rough-hewn, a place that forever bears the fractures of labor and disaster.
Meat – decayed, degraded and abandoned – was never far from Smith’s thoughts. In the 1980s, she trained as an emergency medical technician and witnessed her sister and friends succumb to premature deaths from AIDS-related complications.
Elsewhere the body is made more playfully changeable. Lynda Benglis’s rust-colored Untitled (Polly’s Pie II) lies on the gallery floor, a messy pile of coagulated polyurethane foam (part of her “fallen paintings” series), which has resided in the NGA collection for decades.
“Benglis is very interested in the machismo of the gesture [in art]. She takes the gesture and says, ‘Well look, I’m going to do 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 acts 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 comical, carnal extremes, mocking the weaknesses inherent in desire, and the limits placed on women’s sexuality. .
“The idea of body parts, disembodied bodies is so important to all these artists,” says Ward. “The show [asks] what happens internally in a body – both in the sense of mimetic, imaginary and muscle memory – but also: what happens to the body if it cannot stand on its own?’
In addition to the work of other esteemed international artists (such as Sarah Lucas, Marlene Dumas, Ana Mendieta and Nancy Spero), there is a dedicated space for the early work of Australian sculptor Bronwyn Oliver, known for her mesh-like metal sculptures. The collection shown here was created during her studies at the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1984.
These are tantalizing, unnerving objects that look like long-lost artifacts of an extinct species; skeletal, shell-like and tusked. “I wanted to reduce the ideas and associations to (physically and metaphorically) just the bones,” she once said of her practice, “uncovering the life that is still within you.”
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Deep Inside My Heart is open at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until May 2024. Guardian Australia traveled to Canberra as a guest of the NGA