Mene Inc. Unveils New 'Mene x' Louise Bourgeois Jewelry Collection

Menē Inc. (TSX-V:MENE) (US:MENEF) (“Menē” or the “Company”), an online 24 karat investment jewelry brand, today launched a new Menē x unlimited edition jewelry collection in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, a non-profit and charitable organization founded by Louise Bourgeois, dedicated to preserving her legacy.

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Louise Bourgeois in her studio in Italy contemplating GERMINAL, 1967. © The Easton Foundation (Photo: Studio Fotografico I. Bessi Carrara)

Menē x Louise Bourgeois marks Menē’s first collaboration with an artist. Louise Bourgeois is the most influential female sculptor of the 20th century, and this is the first time that The Easton Foundation has partnered with a jewelry brand for an unlimited series of 24k gold and platinum jewelry. For this new and exclusive collection featuring three pendant designs, Diana Widmaier Picasso and her friend Jerry Gorovoy, Director of The Easton Foundation, chose three iconic sculptures of the artist: Spider, Arch of Hysteria, and Spiral.

“We are pleased to democratize access to the artwork of one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century, Louise Bourgeois,” said Diana Widmaier Picasso, Co-Founder and Chief Artistic Officer of Menē. “Her creations dig into the psyche from a very original perspective and our jewelry collaboration ‘Spider’, ‘Arc of Hysteria’ and ‘Spiral’ are among the most celebrated works in the art world.”

The “Menē x Louise Bourgeois” collection follows the same Menē principles, as all jewelry items are crafted from 24 karat gold and platinum and sold transparently by gram weight. These designs also carry the Menē Lifetime Guarantee. Menē has agreed to donate a portion of net proceeds to the Easton Foundation in connection with sales from the collection.

Bourgeois’ illustrious career spanned eight decades, encompassing sculpture, drawing, printmaking, installation, and writing. Always at the forefront of successive new developments, Bourgeois looked techniques, ideas, and images rooted in her memories and experiences of childhood to create radically new and powerful pieces of art, with the intention of evoking emotional responses from her audience. Today, her work is celebrated in all major museums all around the world: her famous spider, Maman, is a permanent fixture in London, Tokyo, Spain, and Seoul.

The Menē x Louise Bourgeois collection includes:

SPIDER

Louise Bourgeois’ Spiders, also titled Maman, embodies the archetype of the mother. Bourgeois held spiders in great esteem. She saw them as ingenious, as once strong and delicate, and above all, as maternal protectors. The artist turned them into a representation of her own mother, Joséphine Fauriaux, who died when Bourgeois was just 21. The young Bourgeois had assisted her mother in her work restoring tapestries. The arachnid, with its ability to produce threads of silk and weave complex webs, was the perfect metaphor for her parent.

Unparalleled in craftsmanship and with exquisite detail, the iconic Spider is now brought to life in splendent 24 karat gold and pure platinum.

ARCH OF HYSTERIA

The Arch of Hysteria is an expression of powerful and profound human emotion. It represents the contortions of a dancer or an acrobat. Its body creates an eternal movement in which Louise Bourgeois represents the balance between extreme tension and extreme relaxation, between psychic conflict and orgasmic release. It also refers to the studies of Jean-Martin Charcot, a nineteenth-century French neurologist working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, best known for his pioneering work on “hysteria”.

Expertly handcrafted from 24 karat gold and pure platinum, this detailed replica is striking in both radiance and form.

SPIRAL

Spiral looks like a cocoon, a chrysalis where the caterpillar can grow into a butterfly. It is a safe place, a home that protects individuals and allows growth and evolution. It is a protection symbol turned into an amulet in 24 karat gold and pure platinum.

The Menē x Louise Bourgeois collection is now available exclusively online at www.mene.com/x/.

Images of “Menē x Louise Bourgeois” can be downloaded here.

About Menē Inc.

Menē crafts pure 24 karat gold and platinum jewelry that is transparently sold by gram weight. Through mene.com, customers may buy jewelry, monitor the value of their collection over time, and sell or exchange their pieces by gram weight at prevailing market prices. Menē was founded by Roy Sebag and Diana Widmaier-Picasso with a mission to restore the relationship between jewelry and savings. Menē empowers consumers by marrying innovative technology, timeless design, and pure precious metals to create pieces which endure as a store of value.

For more information about Menē, visit mene.com.

About Louise Bourgeois

Internationally renowned artist Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Although she lived in New York from 1938 until her death in 2010, much of her inspiration was derived from her early childhood in France. Using the body as a primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of the human condition. From poetic drawings to room size installations, she was able to give her fears physical form in order to exorcise them. Memory, sexuality, love, and abandonment are the core of her complex body of work. Louise Bourgeois's art was all about contrasts or oppositions. She would cast doubt upon the actual difference between conventionally distinct notions such as male and female, violence and erotism, and call our archetypal imagery into question. She was always drawing inspiration from her personal experience, and adopting objects such as cages or medical tools, forms as spirals, themes as spiders in order to create. Her sculptures or installations dealt with the domestic world, family, body and femininity, through an approach based on psychology and the unconscious; and she would shape all this into abstract yet universal works of art.

About The Easton Foundation:

The Easton Foundation was established by Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s as a non-profit and charitable organization. The artist’s collection was donated in 2010 when the artist died. The foundation is dedicated to Bourgeois’s legacy. Serving to promote the scholarship and awareness of Bourgeois’s life and art, the Foundation aims to cultivate new interpretations of her work while providing a deeper understanding of her artistic process and creative milieu. The Louise Bourgeois Archive includes personal writings, letters, family photographs, exhibition announcements, and diaries. These papers offer unique insight to Bourgeois’s various artistic motivations and the ways in which they were manifested in her art. For more, visit: www.theeastonfoundation.org/

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