Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American artist best known for pioneering sculpture and installation work featuring monumental, abstract, and often biomorphic works. She exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists, and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art. However, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement, and the stylistic evolution of her work defies historical categorization.
Born in Paris, Bourgeois grew up in a family that ran a tapestry restoration business, which later influenced her use of textiles and fabrics in her artwork. She studied art in Paris and later moved to New York City in 1938, where she became a central figure in the city’s art scene.
Bourgeois’s work often dealt with themes of trauma, sexuality, and the human body, and she is perhaps best known for her large-scale sculptures of spiders, which she described as representations of her mother. Throughout her career, Bourgeois was the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo exhibitions at major museums worldwide, and her work continues to be celebrated for its emotional power and psychological insight.
In addition to being one of the most celebrated sculptors in the period following World War II, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. The book Louise Bourgeois (2008) documents her work, and her house and studio in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood were opened as a museum of her life and work in 2017.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Louise Bourgeois
An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.
—Louise Bourgeois
Topics: Ability
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