Louise Bourgeois

(France-United States of America, 25/12/1911 - 31/05/2010)

One of the most influential and psychologically resonant artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Bourgeois’s career spanned more than seven decades, throughout which time, she produced a profoundly personal body of work that explored memory, sexuality, fear, intimacy and the complexities of family relationships. Working across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, installation and textile, Bourgeois transformed her private emotional experiences into a universal visual language.

Born in Paris, she grew up in a household centred on the restoration of antique tapestries, a craft that left a lasting imprint on her understanding of material, repair and fragmentation. Her early experiences with turbulent family dynamics became a wellspring for her art, shaping its recurring themes of betrayal, protection, vulnerability and resilience.

In 1930, she began studying mathematics at Sorbonne in Paris, a discipline she credited with sharpening her sense of structure and balance, before making a decisive turn toward art after graduating in 1935. Beginning her artistic education at the École des Beaux-Arts and École du Louvre, she went on to study at many prominent independent academies around Montparnasse and Montmartre, including the Académie Colarossi, Académie Ranson, Académie Julian and Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Moving to New York in 1938, she immersed herself in the city’s vibrant artistic milieu while developing a voice distinctly her own, independent of prevailing movements such as Abstract Expressionism. Her early sculptures of the 1940s and 1950s, often vertical, totemic forms in wood, suggested both human presence and architectural instability, reflecting her feelings of displacement and isolation as an émigré.

Bourgeois’s work grew increasingly visceral and confrontational in subsequent decades and, from the 1960s onward, she employed latex, rubber, plaster and bronze to create biomorphic forms that evoked the body and its psychological states. Throughout this time, sexuality and gender emerged as explicit subjects, rendered with both tenderness and aggression, but her art continuously refused idealisation, instead embracing ambivalence, contradiction and emotional intensity.

In the 1990s, Bourgeois achieved widespread recognition with her monumental spider sculptures, most notably Maman (1999). Far from symbols of a lone menace, the spiders functioned as complex metaphors for her mother – protective, industrious, and quietly powerful. During this period, she also developed her immersive ‘Cells’, enclosed installations combining found objects and textiles to create intimate spaces of memory and confinement.

Bourgeois continued to work into her late nineties, producing drawings and fabric pieces that revisited earlier themes with renewed clarity. Her late acclaim, which included retrospectives at major global institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, affirmed the enduring relevance of her art that remains a testament to the power of sustained self-examination and demonstrates how personal history can be transformed into works of lasting emotional and artistic force.

Image: Louise Bourgeois, Spider (1994). Bronze, silver nitrate, brown patina and granite, 274.3 x 457.2 x 378.5 cm. National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern One), Scotland.