Louise Bourgeois was born
in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including
the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie
Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated
to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students
League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and
painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural
work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader.
Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists
who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s
early sculpture was composed of groupings of
abstract
and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began
to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces
themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the
dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously
stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never
lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply
symbolic,
her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality
played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand
and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the
female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are
charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the
two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums
around the world. She lives in New York.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Cheim & Read, New York | Hauser & Wirth, London
Louise Bourgeois on the Art21 blog |
