Louise Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois is a French sculptor and visual artist born in Paris, 1911, and died in New York, 2010. At the age of ten, she discovered art through her parents who held a restoration workshop in old tapestries. She enjoys drawing and working with the patterns of the tapestries. Subsequently, Louise Joséphine bégan first began studying mathematics at the Sorbonne but changed direction in 1936. She then entered the Beaux-Arts and attended the Ranson Academy and the Louvre school with professors such as Fernand Léger or Paul Colin.

In 1938, she married the American historian Robert Goldwater and together they moved to New York. There, she frequented the surrealists fleeing Nazism and exhibited for the first time in 1945. Louise Bourgeois first began with painting, following the movement of the New York School, then from 1949 she concentrated more in addition to sculpture and wishes to express through his works “the drama of being one in the midst of the world".

From the 1960s, Louise Bourgeois asserted herself more and more in a singular personal style and explored new materials such as latex and rubber. She was then one of the first artists to create installations, assembling painted wood totems and defining “landscapes-dens" made of latex and plaster.

Today recognized as an artist who had a major influence on the art world and feminist circles, Louise Bourgeois did not experience real success at the time until the 1970s. In 1982 she published Child Abuse, a retrospective of her work including photos from her childhood and which gave her international fame.