Louise Bourgeois was a French American artist celebrated for her innovative sculptures, paintings, and prints. Her career spanned over seven decades, and she is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations, particularly her iconic spider series, including the monumental Maman.
Read MoreFor Bourgeois, artmaking was a cathartic process through which she transformed personal trauma into universal symbols of vulnerability and power.
She tackled themes of sexuality, desire, gender and the unconscious. While she came to fame only during her 70s, she worked well into her 90s and has been hugely influential on subsequent generations of artists.
Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in a household intimately connected to textiles with her parents owning a gallery specialising in antique tapestries. However, her childhood was marked by betrayal and psychological trauma. She witnessed her father's affair with the family's au pair unfold brazenly in their home, whilst at the same time watching her terminally ill mother tolerate the infidelity.
Her mother, a tapestry restorer, taught her to sketch the missing fragments of damaged textiles, nurturing an early fascination with repair as a metaphor for emotional healing.
Reconciling the tension between nurture and betrayal, which was embodied by each of her parents, would become a lifelong obsession with Bourgeois.
Initially pursuing mathematics at the Sorbonne, Bourgeois abandoned this path after her mother's death to study art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.
Bourgeois deeply autobiographical artwork explores her personal memories and trauma, giving them powerful, tangible form in sculptures and installations.
Upon marrying the art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938, Bourgeois moved to New York City, enrolled in the Art Students League and began making sculptures from wood found on her apartment building's roof. The body and feminism were revealed as concerns in these early works; made in response to her new role as a wife and mother in America. The 1946–7 series of drawings and paintings Femme Maison, for example, depict nude female bodies with their heads replaced by houses, signifying the stifling effects of domesticity.
Bourgeois' first notable shift toward sculpture came with her Personages series (1946 -1955), which included symbolic wooden figures that she arranged in groupings. These vertical sculptures, first exhibited at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, represented the fractured relationships she had left in her former life in France. Works like Knife Couple (1949) and Quarantania (1947–53) exemplified this period, with the vertical forms evoking both human figures and the New York skyline visible from her rooftop studio. This venture into psychoanalysis earned Bourgeois her first recognition from major institutions like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York.
The 1960s marked a significant expansion in Bourgeois sculptural language. She moved towards more organic forms and experimented with new materials including latex, rubber, bronze, and marble that could evoke the body's presence. The marble sculpture Cumul I (1968) introduced her signature bulbous forms—spherical shapes in various states of concealment under a sheet, often resembling egg sacs, phalluses, breasts, and testicles. Their repetition in Janus Fleuri (1968) and Filette (1968), granted depth to her feminist exploration of the concept of masculinity as innately vulnerable.
After the death of her husband in 1973, Bourgeois channelled her grief and anger into one of her most iconic works, The Destruction of the Father (1974). The installation was rooted in Bourgeois' revenge fantasy: a scene in which the children, exasperated by their domineering father, overpower him at the dinner table, dismember him, and consume him. The installation presented a site where nurture and violence meet, symbolising Bourgeois' desire to dismantle the patriarchal authority that plagued her childhood. This period saw Bourgeois confront her past more intensely, developing a cathartic expression of repressed rage.
Bourgeois' career underwent a dramatic ascension during the 1980s after she moved her studio to a larger Brooklyn space. The freedom of a larger studio allowed her to embark on a series of large-scale installation works that she called Cells. Most often enclosed by wire cages or wood, Cells such as Cell (The Last Climb) (2008) or Red Room (Child) (1994) imprisoned sculptures and readymade objects that literalised Bourgeois' specific fears and anxieties. In this way, the 'Cells' acted as both confession and containment. Bourgeois saw the process as a means to gain closure on her traumatic past, stating, 'You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you'.
At the same time, the motif of hands emerged as a powerful symbol in Bourgeois' work during this period. Works like Nature Study (1986) and The Welcoming Hands (1996) would often show delicate, feminine-looking hands in a protective embrace. Typically shown severed at their forearms, the hands would suggest disembodiment and loss, subtly invoking the yearning that Bourgeois felt for her late mother's touch.
It wasn't until 1994 that Bourgeois began the works for which she is perhaps best known: a series of monumental spider sculptures, known as 'Mamans', that she made as tributes to her mother, whom she saw as a protective figure. While she had been drawing the insects since at least the mid-1940s, it took 50 years for the motif to be realised as a metaphor for the mother figure. Instead of frightening or repulsive, Bourgeois considered spiders protective as they eat mosquitos and prevent disease. These monumental spiders, which viewers can walk around and below, have been installed at the Brooklyn Museum, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa^.^
Other notable public artworks include the fountain Father and Son (2005), installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. Comprising larger-than-life sculptures of a man and boy, the fountain's figures are obscured from one another as the water rises and falls - a direct reference to the troubled parent-child relationship that characterises much of Bourgeois' output.
Bourgeois' first museum retrospective was held in 1982 at MoMA when the artist was 70. Since then, and following her death in New York at the age of 98, her work has been exhibited extensively in international institutions.
Bourgeois work is the subject of numerous public commissions, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, some of which are included below:
Louise Bourgeois has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions at important institutions, below are some examples:
Louise Bourgeois' work has been extensively covered in leading art publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and Artforum, which have underscored her unflinching exploration of trauma, femininity, and psychoanalytic themes as revolutionary yet deeply personal. Frieze and The Financial Times praised her ability to translate private trauma into universal symbols, whilst The New Criterion offered tempered critique, acknowledging her raw emotional power but questioning the consistency of her formal innovation.
Bourgeois's art explores complex themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, identity, motherhood, domesticity, and the unconscious. Her work is deeply personal, often reflecting her own experiences and psychological struggles, yet it resonates universally due to its emotional intensity and honesty.
Her most recognised work is Maman (1999), a giant spider sculpture over 30 feet high, which has been exhibited globally, including at the Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
The spider is one of Bourgeois's most famous motifs, symbolising her mother, who was a weaver and a figure of protection and strength. The spider represents both the nurturing and the complex, sometimes threatening, aspects of motherhood and femininity.
Bourgeois's early life was marked by her family's tapestry restoration business and her father's infidelity, which deeply affected her. These experiences informed her exploration of family dynamics, trauma, and the roles of women in her art.
While Bourgeois's work frequently addresses themes of femininity, gender, and power, she did not explicitly align herself with feminist movements. However, her art naturally engaged with women's issues and challenged traditional gender roles.
Bourgeois worked with a wide range of materials, including marble, bronze, fabric, rubber, and found objects. She was also a prolific printmaker and painter, known for her innovative use of organic and abstract forms.
Bourgeois mentored and inspired many contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin. Her openness about psychological struggles and her exploration of taboo subjects paved the way for future generations to address personal and social issues through art.
Bourgeois' works are held in major museum collections worldwide, including:
Ocula | 2025
