Louise Bourgeois

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois started to learn her artistic skills in the family workshop for the restoration of tapestries and carpets.
She left university, where she was studying mathematics, to study in the studios of Montparnesse and Montmartre, including those of Paul Colin and Fernand Léger. In 1938 she moved with American husband to New York, where she still lives and works.
The first solo exhibition of her paintings was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, in 1945, while the first exhibition devoted to her sculptures took place at the Peridot Gallery, New York, in 1949.
At the beginning of the 1960s she began to abandon her geometric works in wood for spiral biomorphic forms in plaster. In 1966 she began to explore the themes of the body and sexuality, causing a stir in 1968 with Fillette, a phallic image presented as the artist's doll. From 1967 to 1971 she worked in Italy, making marble sculptures, which she continued to produce right through the 1980s.

In 1974 Bourgeois's work began to address her complex relationship with her father, expressing it through hybrid and ambiguous forms that were both organic and sexual. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a retrospective of her work produced over a period of forty years. In the 1990s, now internationally famous, she worked on the series of Cells, spaces delimited on four sides by doors and windows placed side by side to enclose an area that is visible but not accessible.
This is adorned with objects belonging to the artist or associated with her work, so that it becomes a container charged with psychological and emotional meanings. In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.