LOUISE BOURGEOIS

For 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.

Early Years

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.

Louise Bourgeois Artworks

Bourgeois deeply autobiographical artwork explores her personal memories and trauma, giving them powerful, tangible form in sculptures and installations.

New York

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.

Sculpture

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.

Material Exploration

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.

Mature Work

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.

Public Commissions and Awards

Bourgeois work is the subject of numerous public commissions, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, some of which are included below:

• Facets of the Sun, 1978, General Services Administration, Federal Building, Manchester, New Hampshire.
• Helping Hands, 1989, Jane Addams Memorial Committee & Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago Women's Park, Chicago.
• Granite Eyeball Benches and Bronze Water Fountain, 1999, Agnes R. Katz Plaza, Pittsburgh.
• Maman, 1999, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao.
• Maman, 2000, Tate Modern, London.
• The Welcoming Hands, 1996, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris.
• Father and Son, 2005, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle.

What Are Some Notable Awards and Accolades?

• National Medal of Arts, 1997, President of the United States.
• Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, 1999, Venice Biennale.
• Praemium Imperiale (Sculpture), 1999, Japan Art Association.
• Legion of Honor (Légion d'honneur), 2008, President of France.
• Grand Prix National de Sculpture, 1991, French Ministry of Culture.
• Lifetime Achievement Award, 1991, International Sculpture Center, Washington D.C.
• Wolf Prize in the Arts, 2003, Wolf Foundation, Israel.
• Induction, 2009, National Women's Hall of Fame, Seneca Falls, New York.

What Are Some Notable Exhibitions?

Louise Bourgeois has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions at important institutions, below are some examples:

Solo Exhibitions

• Mori Art Museum, Tokyo — Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful, 2024–2025.
• Galleria Borghese, Rome — Louise Bourgeois. Unconscious Memories, 2024.
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney — Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?, 2023–2024.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Louise Bourgeois: Paintings, 2022.
• Tate Modern, London — Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective, 2007–2008.
• Centre Pompidou, Paris — Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective, 2008.
• Hauser & Wirth, New York — Louise Bourgeois: Once there was a mother, 2023.
• Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland — Artist Rooms: Louise Bourgeois, 2024.

Group Exhibitions

• ICA Los Angeles — Scientia Sexualis, 2024–2025.
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam — Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, 2024.
• Tate Modern, London — Artist Rooms: Louise Bourgeois, 2023.
• Hauser & Wirth, Monaco — Surreal Legacies, 2024.
• Barbican, London — Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, 2023–2024.
• David Zwirner, New York — Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, 2018.
• Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain — Structures of Existence: The Cells, 2016.
• Haus der Kunst, Munich — Structures of Existence: The Cells, 2015.

Critical reception

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.

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