Art reviews: Louise Bourgeois | Sukaina Kubba | Jackie Anderson | Wonder

While the arachnids in the Louise Bourgeois show in Aberdeen are modestly sized compared to some of her behemoths, they are still a fine demonstration of her genius as a sculptor, writes Susan Mansfield

Louise Bourgeois, Aberdeen Art Gallery *****

Sukaina Kubba: Turn Me Into A Flower, Dundee Contemporary Arts ***

Jackie Anderson: New Work, 37 Otago Street, Glasgow ****

Installation view of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery PIC: Graeme Yule

Wonder, Watt Institution, Greenock ****

If you’re afraid of spiders, you’ll need to take a deep breath before visiting the exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ work at Aberdeen Art Gallery. Part of the Artist Rooms touring programme, the show also draws on additional loans to bring together a significant group of works from the hugely productive two decades before the artist’s death in 2010 at the age of 98. Aberdeen is the only Scottish venue to receive it.

Throughout her long career, Bourgeois made work which explored aspects of her own life and experience: birth, motherhood, trauma, family, relationships. In her late work, spiders became a recurring motif which she associated with her mother, a weaver who restored antique tapestries. The spider mother was fiercely protective of and nurturing to her young, but also tough and predatory.

While the arachnids in this show are modestly sized compared to some of her behemoths, they are a fine demonstration of her genius as a sculptor. While carrying immense metaphorical weight and personal significance, they are just so damn spidery. Everything about them is exactly right.

Installation view of Sukaina Kubba: Turn Me Into A Flower at Dundee Contemporary Arts PIC: Ruth Clark

This is the case time and again in this exhibition. Couple 1 is a textile sculpture of an intertwined man and woman, suspended from a meat hook. They have no faces, but their body language tells us everything: this is intimacy and mutual dependence, it is both wanted and impossible to escape from. The woman’s little black socks are absurdly, endearingly human.

From the bronze cast of an arm, open hand at one end, fist at another, to the installation of clothes and body forms on a metal armature, these works are succinct, profound and beautifully realised.

Her two-dimensional works are also a revelation, from the paintings in an expressive, naive style to the deft spirals made using Japanese print techniques, and the dazzling draftsmanship of the etchings and drypoints in the 1995 series Ode A Ma Mère (more spiders, I’m afraid). A “book” made from cloth, patched, dyed and woven, telling the story of her return as an adult to the French village where she grew up, is another masterpiece of skill. Like many of the works here, it looks as fresh as if it was made yesterday.

Few artists stand up to a comparison with Bourgeois, and it would be unfair to lay this burden on Sukaina Kubba, though there is one point of comparison at least: an interest in textile. Kubba, born in Iraq and now based in Canada, is drawn to Persian rugs, a staple of traditional nomadic life where they would be laid or hung to create a home in each new location, and a cultural anchor in her own family’s wanderings since leaving their homeland.

Kubba works with particular rugs, painstakingly tracing their patterns, and remakes the designs using modern materials derived from industrial processes, such as latex and PLA filament. Some of the pieces in this show were made using 3D printing techniques during a residency at DCA Print Studio.

The show begins with one specific rug, originating in Kurdistan and discovered by chance by Kubba during a residency in Chile’s Atacama Desert. She shows us how she traced the pattern on paper and made new versions using PLA filament and an inverse tracing on latex, working with different colours and textures.

The show continues, adapting other rug designs, in Gallery Two, using the full height of the space to hang larger works floor-to-ceiling. The patterns are reproduced using paper pulp casting, embossing, screen printing and laser etching. They are so tactile – the black embossed version looks like velvet – that DCA has provided a sample box which visitors are free to touch.

There is a quiet intensity to the work, a supreme focus. The danger is that the repetitive nature of the practice is more interesting to the artist than to the viewer. While the works (rugs? sculptures?) are impressive objects, they don’t tell us the stories of their makers and owners, or interrogate the ideas around, for example, Western appropriation of elements of Persian rug design. While all this is part of the artist’s thinking, there isn’t a vehicle in this show to communicate it to the viewer.

Glasgow-based painter Jackie Anderson has made a name for herself as an artist who finds beauty in the everyday, capturing faces in a bus queue or a busy street, ordinary folk lost in moments of quiet introspection. Building up washes of thin oil paint, manipulating and scraping back, she captures a sense of how lives overlap in the chaos of the city. Also a fine portraitist, she has been selected on multiple occasions for the BP Portrait Award (now the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award), and has been again this year.

Her latest show, in a former carpet showroom in Glasgow’s Otago Street, is a chance to see a body of new work alongside a selection of her earlier paintings. The new paintings have a deeper degree of stillness about them. Like her earlier series of frosted fields glimpsed from train windows, they don’t always feature people. But she is still, determinedly, finding beauty in unexpected places: the intricacy of an x-ray, a tree glimpsed through a waiting room window, the rooftop car park at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital opening, against all expectations, into an expansive, light-filled sky.

Meanwhile, painter Alison Watt has been invited to curate a small show of paintings from the collection of the Watt Institution in her native Greenock. Like many regional museums in Scotland, the Watt (also known as the McLean Museum & Art Gallery) has remarkable riches, in this case particularly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The show is also a tribute to Alison’s father, the maritime artist James Watt, who took her to the museum as a child, beginning a lifelong engagement with painting.

Watt is an artist skilled in the act of looking, and these works deserve to be looked at long and carefully. Each one is doing something surprising, from Emil Carlsen’s surreal still life to JD Fergusson’s experimental landscape, The Bridge and Schiehallion, in which the forms almost fragment into abstract patterns of colour and light.

FCB Cadell’s Creme de Menthe, a woman lost in contemplation at a recently vacated dinner table, is surprising in its loosely handled paint; the figure seems to lose definition the longer one looks. The showstopper, though, is Gerald Brockhurst’s Dorette, a portrait of startling intensity, outstanding both in its execution and in the absorbing gaze of its subject.

Louise Bourgeois until 9 June; Sukaina Kubba until 4 August; Jackie Anderson, 24-27 May; Wonder until December