Last chance to see - Louise Bourgeois' Fabric Works at Saville Row

What better way to launch an exhibition space on Saville Row than with a show devoted to fabric? Those already familiar with Louise Bourgeois' work, however, will probably know that the collection currently on show at Hauser & Wirth's new gallery is likely to have more to do with trauma than tailoring.

Fabric Works (on show until 18 December), covers the last period in Bourgeois' life, from 2003 until her death in May 2010. The pieces - 70 in total, plus three sculptures - are highly-personal commentaries on and reactions to her life experiences, most famously the discovery as a child that her English governess was also her father's mistress. The collection here includes works sewn from clothes given as presents by her 'loathed' father and never worn, and fabric 'drawings' resembling spider webs; the spider is a recurring theme in her work and a motif for which she is probably best known (one of Bourgeois' most familiar works is Maman, the nine metre-high steel sculpture of a spider now owned by Tate Modern). 

Fabric Works is the last exhibition Bourgeois worked on directly (she died a few weeks before the show's initial opening in Venice). A major solo exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, will take place in South America in 2011, opening at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, in March and travelling to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paolo, and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.

Follow the link to Dazed Digital's interview with Hauser & Wirth gallery director Sara Harrison