Louis Bourgeois: Give or Take (How do you feel this morning?)
1990
Photo: Jesse Untracht-Oakner
Give or Take (How do you feel this morning?), Bourgeois’s limited-edition sculpture for the New Museum, is a small clawlike figure without base or supporting structure. Five fingerlike forms with sharp, polished claws curve to articulate a crawling beast. Cast from an orangey bronze and oxidized to blacken its crevices, Give or Take has the wrinkled surface of a reptilian skin that gives way to flat planar surfaces with geometric edges on the back of the paw. The fingers are bloated, ovoid sacs that recall formal shapes introduced by Bourgeois in the 1960s.
Details
Give or Take (How do you feel this morning?), 1990
Bronze
4 1/2 × 9 × 6 in (11.4 × 22.8 × 15.2 cm)
Edition of 40
Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York