Castello di Ama

[…] If the hysterical arc in Bougeois' other work shows a world of tension beyond the dualism of the sexes in the sense of isolation, the new work for the Castello di Ama instead offers a moment of total synthesis: pieces of pink marble in a phase of continuous self-fertilization, a female figure transformed into a budding phallus.

Bourgeois chose a hidden, dark place and built a vertical figure within this humid space. She is undoubtedly a female figure, but she is also a budding sexual organ in a roiling phase of satisfaction with an infinite gush of fluidity.

It is an independent, autonomous thing, which the Gnostics would define as pleroma. Plato had dreamed of such a being. It is now complete.

Daniel Birnbaum