Anxiety and mystery are woven into her sculpture

WORCESTER -- Born in Paris in 1911, a New Yorker since 1938, Louise Bourgeois is one of the last of the great, first-generation French Surrealists, and she is still, at 95, one of the most intriguing sculptors working today. Her influence is everywhere. Kiki Smith, Robert Gober , and Amy Sillman are just three much admired contemporary artists who have evolved more or less consciously under the spell of her psychologically charged, viscerally physical, restlessly exploratory art.

I'm not a total fan; sometimes a heavy-handed theatricality in her work puts me off. But I try not to miss her exhibitions, and I can heartily recommend the small, beautiful show of just seven pieces titled "The Woven Child (in context)" that is on view now at the Worcester Art Museum.

The exhibition was organized by the museum's contemporary art curator Susan L. Stoops to celebrate the acquisition of a Bourgeois sculpture called "The Woven Child" (2002). Like that piece, the other six works dating from 1996 to 2004 all use fabric as a primary material. Nicely spaced out in a large, bright , and airy gallery, they collectively exude a dreamy, sometimes creepy, sometimes darkly comical Freudian poetry.

In the exhibition's centerpiece, "The Woven Child," the figure of a newborn infant made of stuffed white cloth lies on the stomach of a tightly stuffed, headless , and armless female torso fashioned from white patches roughly stitched together. It is a heartbreaking tableau: The child needs to be held and comforted, but the mother has no arms to do so, and without a face she cannot gaze into her baby's eyes. She has breasts with sewn nipples, but she may as well be dead for all the nurturing she can give. The child, motionless in its placenta-like shroud, might be dead, too.

Enhancing the tragic mood, the sculpture is isolated in a clinical steel and glass display case, like an artifact in a museum of medical history.

There's an outsider-like dimension to Bourgeois's art. In another steel and glass vitrine, seven bald, naked people, three with two heads each and all made of stuffed pink fabric, are like weird sock dolls created by a sexually obsessed madwoman. Lying side by side on a diminutive mattress with arms interlaced, they engage in a bizarre familial orgy.

Bourgeois often speaks of her earliest years as the main source of her art. In a quote reproduced in the exhibition catalogue, she says, "All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama." Her work has been a lifelong project of excavating her own psychic past.

There have been hints in Bourgeois's art that she underwent some terrible emotional trauma long ago. In the earliest piece in the Worcester show, an untitled work from 1996, two incongruous objects hang from rods projecting on opposite sides of a central pole: a partially stuffed red dress -- ordinary but for the pointy tail dangling from its hem to the floor -- and a small bronze sculpture of coiled stuff like intestines .

A satanic vibe emanates from this work; something evil or disgusting is lurking under the surface of mundane life. ("Rosemary's Baby" comes to mind.) What if anything it might have to do with Bourgeois's own biography remains tantalizingly unknown, but the feeling that it may allude to personal experience adds to the hair-raising urgency.

For all its insidious horror, though, the surrealistic meeting of the red dress and the intestinal coil is also kind of hilarious. Bourgeois is nothing if not a playful artist. A slender, nearly - 7-foot - tall stack of square, pink, hand made cushions that increase in size from the bottom up is a witty, feminizing riff on minimalist, Donald Judd-style repetition. Brancusi's phallically towering "Endless Column" comes to mind as a target, too. Bourgeois's title, "The Cold of Anxiety," which is stitched into the side of one cushion, slyly admits to feelings not usually expressed in formalist abstraction.

In a series of collages sewn to all-fabric pages of a book called "Ode à l'Oubli," sheer delight in color, pattern, texture, and design drives the abstraction. I think of painters like Klee and Miro. But the book is also autobiographical, as the fabric scraps and remnants are from Bourgeois's own old clothes and linens. It's useful to know, too, that her mother operated a tapestry repair business. Bourgeois grew up surrounded by fine textiles and craftspeople who worked with them.

On one page of "Ode à l' Oubli," red block letters spell the paradoxical statement, "I had a flashback of something that never existed." In Bourgeois's psychoanalytic theater, the play unfolds in the space between memory and fantasy.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.