Dia NY: a silent converation between Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois

The past weekend we went to Curtis' nephew's wedding in upstate NY and took the time to visit Dia at Beacon, the Riggio gallery of the Dia art foundation established to collect modern and contemporary art since 1974. The gallery is in a 1920s Bauhaus-style printing factory. Its minimalism vast space and flooding natural light sets up a surreal stage to present the artwork in its collection.
Needless to say, there are many pieces that are landmarks of modern art, such as Chamberlain's monumental sculpture The Privet, Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, and Donald Judd's untitled wooden boxes, to just name a few. What I found mostly visceral was the presentation of Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois' work. Serra's work is known for its complexity masked by the simplest forms. His deployment of steel provokes an impersonal, rational feeling when first approached, yet with each minutes spent with them, one was more and more absorbed into its organic forms and gigantic proportions, maneuvered to overpower the sense of being. The feelings when one walks into his sculptures becomes very much personal, so intense in a way as if one embarks on a psychic journey, a little bit unpredictable, intriguing and repelling at the same time.
I think Serra's work (especially the Torque series in Dia) deals with our emotion in reaction to the outside and everything within its scope, an intuitive emotion that we are born with, which through his work, is reduced to the absolute abstract. Louise Bourgeois' work, like the shadow of Serra's, the ying to the yang, complements strangely well with Serra in both scale, material and concept, by dealing with our emotions in reaction to the inside. It digs deep into our primordial memories that we build and then suppress in order to live on. Compared to Serra's work, her form is bodily instead of celestial, her dimension is personal rather than imposing, yet their work both provoke the visceral feelings, one of inside and the other outside, which ultimately is the same fundamental thing because emotion, regardless lies within ourselves and often stay with ourselves.
I have been a fan of Bourgeois for a long time. In 2007, we spent a whole day in Tate Modern London to look at each piece of her work in the retrospection exhibit. In Dia, with Serra's work looming nearby, I was somehow able to discover yet another layer to the psychic and emotional aspect of her work. To me, that's the beauty of art.