Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a pioneering French-American artist whose psychologically charged work explored memory, sexuality, and the unconscious. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing and textiles, she developed a highly personal symbolic language—often featuring spiders, beds, cages and fragmented bodies—to give form to emotional states and early trauma. Bourgeois’s major retrospective at MoMA in 1982 marked a turning point in the recognition of women in postwar art history. She went on to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale and was the first artist to exhibit in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000. Her work is held in leading museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Tate, MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum. A touchstone for generations of artists, her legacy continues to shape conversations around identity, the body, and the subconscious.
