Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

Louise Bourgeois

Born 1911 in Paris, Louise Bourgeois was the second daughter of parents who ran a tapestry restoration atelier and sales gallery. The effects of a complex family dynamic left a lasting impact on young Bourgeois’s heart: her father’s domineering behavior and the caregiving she provided her chronically ill mother led to pervasive feelings of guilt, betrayal, and abandonment. In 1932, when she was twenty, her mother died. Bourgeois subsequently enrolled in mathematics classes at the Sorbonne University, but her ongoing grief soon turned her to art. She began taking art classes at the Sorbonne, but also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She frequented several artists’ academies and studios in Paris, including that of Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she began exhibiting her work in the mid-1940s. She became an American citizen in 1957 and was the first female sculptor to have a major solo exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. In 1989, she held her first solo exhibition in Europe at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Germany); and in 1993, Bourgeois represented the United States at Venice Biennale. In the 1990s and 2000s, she had numerous important solo exhibitions, including at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1995), Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan, 1997), and Tate Modern (London, 2000).
Bourgeois’s reputation has only grown since her death in 2010. Major exhibitions have been organized at Foundation Beyeler (Basel, Switzerland, 2011), Freud Museum London (2012), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2015), Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany, 2015), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2017), Long Museum (Shanghai, China, 2018), Hayward Gallery (London, 2022), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2022), Belvedere Museum (Vienna, 2023-2024), and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, 2023-2024).