LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Louise Bourgeois, installation view, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris. She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics in 1932 but turned to art the next year. She enrolled at several art schools, including the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in addition to apprenticing in artists’ studios in Montparnasse and Montmartre. She then immigrated to New York in 1938, and continued her studies at the Art Students League. Her first one-person exhibition was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, in 1945, and her sculpture was first shown in 1949 at the Peridot Gallery, New York. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a retrospective, which traveled to various American venues. Her work has since been shown internationally, including in Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992), and the São Paulo Bienal (1996). Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized in 1989, traveling from the Frankfurter Kunstverein to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, among other venues. Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Tate Modern, London, organized a major traveling retrospective of her work in 2007. Bourgeois died in New York City in 2010.