Exhale

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce Exhale, an exhibition of recent work by artist Louise LeBourgeois.

Louise LeBourgeois’s paintings are built through slow accumulation, with layers of pigment laid down, sanded back, and rebuilt until the surface achieves a luminous optical depth. Based in Chicago, she has returned to Lake Michigan as a long-running subject, using its horizon—water, sky, and the shifting atmosphere between them—as a site of sustained attention. Her paintings unfold gradually, inviting the viewer to linger as perception itself begins to slow and sharpen. What may register at first as calm deepens with looking.

The paintings in Exhale were made in the wake of profound personal change and informed by two converging encounters with breath. One of these encounters is the intimate witnessing of her father’s final exhale. The other involves teaching adults, many of whom learned to swim later in life, to move through open water. In this setting, buoyancy depends on the flow of breath. The inhale creates lift, while a full exhale makes space for the next inhale. LeBourgeois draws on this embodied knowledge, allowing rhythm, pressure, and release to structure her compositions.

The horizon runs through LeBourgeois’s work as both anchor and illusion. It is a line that appears to divide the world cleanly, yet is a zone of curvature and atmospheric exchange. The artist is drawn to the human impulse to impose boundaries—between water and sky, between life and death, between one moment and the next—while recognizing how porous those divisions are in reality. Seen this way, the horizon becomes a kind of vanishing point, a place where time appears to compress and expand at once.

Air in the Lung #696 brings these concerns into focused relief. Spanning a wide horizontal format, the work presents Lake Michigan beneath a blustery sky that darkens toward the horizon. Thick yet delicate, the clouds appear to swell as waves move across the frame in a steady cadence, suggesting breath in motion—one maintained through rhythm rather than force. The painting draws its title from a line in Jane Kenyon’s poem “Let Evening Come,” which was recited during her father’s final hours as a gesture of readiness and release, and which quietly acknowledges his impact on her life as a swimmer and artist.

In Through the Lens of Memory #699, the lake becomes a site through which experience is held and recalled as sensation. Memory operates here as accumulation, layered and partially obscured, yet continually present beneath the surface. Light filters through cloud cover, softening the boundary between water and sky and drawing the viewer into a heightened awareness of perception as an embodied phenomenon. What We See Sees Us #700 extends this inquiry into what appears to be a nocturnal register. Here, moonlight emerges through darkness and cloud, appearing less as a fixed source than as an aperture, a seeing presence that reflects the viewer’s own position as observer. LeBourgeois frames this dynamic through an awareness not only of how one sees oneself and how one is seen, but also of how we can turn around and observe others observing us. In this way, in What We See Sees Us #700, the landscape resists the fixed viewpoint of perspective handed down from the Renaissance and proposes instead a field of overlapping viewpoints—human and nonhuman—in which no single position can claim authority.

With Exhale, LeBourgeois does not offer closure so much as a sustained space for feeling. These paintings ask for slowness, and they reward it, inviting viewers to stay long enough for the surface to change, for the calm to become charged, and for the act of looking to itself become a kind of breath.

Louise LeBourgeois was born in 1964 in New Orleans. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University, and an MFA in Creative Writing–Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including an Artadia Grant, and Illinois Arts Council Grant, and several residencies. In addition to exhibiting extensively across the United States and abroad, she has been commissioned to create work for prominent public spaces, such as for the 17th District Police Station as part of the City of Chicago Public Art Program. She taught at Columbia College Chicago for twenty years and gives lectures and talks in academic and other settings. This is her sixth solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.