Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois is one of the most important living French-American artists. A former studio assistant to Miró, she has become over the past fifty years, a significant presence both as a sculptor and as a printmaker.

Over a long career Louise Bourgeois has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art. She transforms the particularities of her early trauma into a series of objects that touch universal concerns in ways that mere confessional repetition would fail to do. Since the mid-1970s Bourgeois has been a magnetic figure for art critics, especially feminist art historians and theorists. Her sculpture and installations can be repellent and sinister as well as erotic and sensual. Her sculpture, with its lumps, bumps, bulbs, bubbles, bulges, slits, coils, craters, wrinkles and holes, can be slick and shiny, or rough and jagged. Her themes are highly personal, including her parents and childhood in France, her domestic confinement and transcendence, her interest in a French tradition of hysteria and creativity. But these subjects are also connected with larger issues, especially of gender.

In 1993 the artist participated at the Venice Biennale. In 1999 she participated in the Melbourne International Biennial 1999. Also in 1999, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Louise Bourgeois
He Disappeared into complete silence, 1947-2005
Illustrated book with 11 etchings and engravings