Continuing through March 28, 2026
Anyone who’s cared for the dying knows what it is to be hyperattentive to breath. As the sick person’s heart falters, the steady flow of oxygen in and out of their lungs yields to erratic gulps, sighs, and prolonged pauses. Eventually comes a last gasp. Then stillness.
Alertness to respiration is no less essential to the open water swimmer. Plunging into a cold lake can cut her breath. Her heart races until she falls into the rhythm of kick, stroke, and breath, and her body naturalizes the swell. She can lift herself with an inhale and energize herself with a well-timed exhale.
A veteran swimmer in Lake Michigan, a short walk from her Chicago home, Louise LeBourgeois is also a long-time painter of the luminous meetings of water and sky she observes at the lake. Her cloud- and seascapes are suffused with the shifts in perception and the bodily sensations — buoyancy, movement, a tingling aliveness — that she feels in the water. As a swimmer, the artist is literally immersed in what she will paint. Swimming and painting share concepts of stroke and flow. Painting, too, is a physical act.
LeBourgeois’s recent work is freighted as well with the experiences of having cared for her terminally ill father, another inveterate open water swimmer. Twelve of the thirteen works in “Exhale” comprise her first set of paintings since his death in 2024. She came to conceive of lake and sky as repositories for her feelings about loving and losing him. Hence, she relates to Lake Michigan as a site where nothing, not even life and death, is settled. Currents keep shifting. Water and clouds engage in vaporous exchange. The horizon is not a rigid boundary, as seen in the Western landscape tradition, but rather a zone where the familiar and the unknowable permeate one another.
Take the nocturnal “What We See Sees Us #700.” The water spanning its lower half is calm, pearlescent, and tinged with yellow. Clouds muffle the atmosphere. But at the sky’s center, their cinerous blues dissolve into a zone of radiance, like a cosmic eye contemplating the scene. In “Straight Line Curved Space #697” the brushstrokes that striate the bottom third again convey glistening water, contained at left and right by a dark band. That band fades towards its center, however, due to the moisture that fans out in all directions. It mottles the sky, mingling near and far, inviting us to deepen our perception of the scene.
“Breathe Steady #707” depicts a sky brightly veiled with mist. Wind whips up the waves. LeBourgeois visualizes their rocking motion with flights of feathered brushstrokes. The water’s tilt and the picture’s spatial ambiguities enhance the sensation of bobbing along in an expanse without navigational markers. Is everything under control? “Breathe Steady,” advises the title, suggesting a swimmer’s — or a daughter’s — inner voice of control.
As for the “707” in this and other titles, the artist numbers her paintings, a practice she began with early landscapes and has continued through hundreds of waterscapes. Some fifteen years ago, she switched from stretched canvas to Claybord, a brand of hardboard coated with kaolin clay. It provides a smooth, absorbent surface. LeBourgeois employs mostly moderately sized panels in square or nearly square formats. After underpainting the panels, she begins building her images, working from memory as she applies layer upon layer of thinned pigments. She cycles in rounds of sanding. The effect is atmospheric and sometimes numinous.
Expanses of white space separate the paintings. This installation reinforces our emotional attention and encourages a meditative frame of mind. LeBourgeois has spoken of her affinity for the art of Agnes Martin by virtue of its “energetic presence,” notwithstanding its non-objective grid imagery. Mark Rothko’s stacked rectangular clouds of color intended as portals to spiritual experience provide another center of aesthetic gravity.
“Air in the Lung #696” even bears a certain visual resemblance to Rothko’s abstractions. The latter are verticals, however, while “Air in the Lung #696” is one of three large horizontals in the show. Unfurling from a darkened horizon, the painting’s enormous cumulonimbus clouds churn and billow. Another horizontal work is “The Last Exhale #702.” Together the two paintings feel like summations of the artist’s recent intimacy with the lake and with life and death. The former evokes the intake of oxygen spelled out in the exhibition title; the latter, with its glowing lacework of clouds, the oxygen’s final release.
