Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois photographed by Oliver Mark, New York, 1996
Born
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois

(1911-12-25)25 December 1911
Paris, France
Died31 May 2010(2010-05-31) (aged 98)
NationalityFrench, American
Education
Known for
Notable workSpider, Cells, Maman, Cumul I, The Destruction of the Father
Movement
Spouse
(m. 1937; died 1973)
Children3, including Jean-Louis Bourgeois
AwardsPraemium Imperiale

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] ; 25 December 1911  31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has a lot in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.