Louise Bourgeois was a French-American artist, born on December 25, 1911, in Paris, France, and passed away on May 31, 2010, in New York City, U.S. Her work, which spans over seven decades, is a profound exploration of a variety of themes including domesticity, family, sexuality, the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes are deeply connected to events from her childhood, which she considered a therapeutic process to work through via her art. Bourgeois was the second of three children born to Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois, who ran a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi. Bourgeois was involved in the family business from a young age, helping to fill in the designs where they had become worn on the tapestries. This early exposure to art and restoration played a significant role in shaping her future career. In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, subjects she valued for their stability and unchangeable rules, which provided her with peace of mind. However, the death of her mother in 1932 profoundly affected her, prompting Bourgeois to abandon mathematics and begin studying art. She attended various art schools in Paris, including the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and studied under artists such as Fernand Léger. In 1938, Bourgeois married American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City. There, she continued her education in art at the Art Students League and began experimenting with different mediums, including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Despite her early career being largely underappreciated, Bourgeois's work began to gain recognition in the 1950s when she concentrated more on sculpture, exploring themes of sexuality, family, and the body through her distinctly abstract but emotionally powerful autobiographical works. Bourgeois's art is known for its exploration of opposite qualities such as light/dark, rough/smooth, and male/female, often alluding to strong emotions tied to her personal experiences. Her work is a means to externalize, examine, and thus control her own emotions, with unpleasant thoughts and memories about her father and his affair with the family’s English nanny being easier to revisit when embodied by her work. Although Bourgeois had been showing her art for many decades, it was not until 1982, when she was granted a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, that she finally took her place as a leading figure in the art world. This honor, seldom granted to a living artist, marked a turning point in her career. In 1993, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, further solidifying her status as a preeminent artist. Bourgeois's work is characterized by its use of a wide variety of materials, including wood, steel, stone, and fabric, and spans a range of forms from sculpture and installation to painting and printmaking. Her sculptures, particularly the large-scale spider structures titled "Maman," are among her most famous works, symbolizing the strength and protectiveness of her mother. Throughout her career, Bourgeois received numerous awards and honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 1997, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1998, the Praemium Imperiale in 1999, and the French Legion of Honor medal in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide and continues to influence contemporary artists across various disciplines. Louise Bourgeois's legacy is that of an artist who used her work as a tool for survival, confronting fear and anxiety through the creation of art. Her deeply personal and introspective approach to art-making has left an indelible mark on the art world, making her one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

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