Created during the final years of Louise Bourgeois’ life, these remarkable gouaches return to questions that had occupied her for more than six decades. Their simplified bodies are reduced to little more than translucent washes of colour contained within a delicate outline, yet they possess extraordinary psychological presence. They seem less like depictions of people than embodiments of emotion, memory and desire.

The title Couples is deliberately ambiguous. Few of the works depict two separate figures. Instead, each body appears to contain another presence within itself. Male and female characteristics coexist in unstable equilibrium, with breasts, swollen abdomens and unmistakably phallic forms repeatedly appearing in the same figure. Rather than presenting fixed identities, Bourgeois imagines the body as fluid, contradictory and perpetually changing.

The transparency of the watercolour allows the forms to appear almost weightless, as though they are simultaneously present and dissolving. Some bodies seem pregnant, others emphatically masculine, while many refuse either description. Bourgeois invites us to accept contradiction rather than resolve it, suggesting that intimacy always involves the coexistence of opposites.