BIOGRAPHY
Louise Bourgeois (b. Paris, 1911, d. New York, 2010) is one of the most influential artists of the past century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career—including performance, painting, and printmaking—she is best known as a sculptor. Bourgeois lived in New York City from 1938 until her death, but much of her inspiration was derived from her childhood. Raised in Paris and its suburbs, she was involved in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop from a young age. Complex relationships with her disloyal father and chronically ill mother led to pervasive feelings of guilt, jealousy, betrayal, and abandonment, themes which form the core of her work. She often stated that the creative process was a form of exorcism: a way of reconstructing memories and emotions in order to free herself from their grasp. From intimate drawings to large-scale installations, oscillating between figuration and abstraction and created from a variety of materials including wood, latex, marble, bronze, and fabric, Bourgeois expressed a range of emotion through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents.
Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors include the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts in 1997; and the French medal of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 2008. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1999 was awarded the Biennale’s Golden Lion for a living master of contemporary art. Bourgeois’s work has been the subject of several major international and traveling retrospectives, including those organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Tate Modern, London; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Recent exhibitions have been in on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Nasjonal Museet, Oslo; Belvedere Museum, Vienna; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.