Louise Bourgeois
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louise Bourgeois
(born in Paris, December 25, 1911) is an artist and sculptor. Her
parents repaired tapestries. At 12, she started helping them draw
the missing segments of the tapestries. At 15 she studied
mathematics at the Sorbonne. Her studies of geometry contributed to
her early cubist drawings. Still searching, she began painting,
studying at the École du Louvre and then the École des Beaux-Arts,
and worked as an assistant to Fernand Léger. In 1938 she moved with
her American husband, Robert Goldwater, to New York City to continue
her studies at the Art Students League of New York, feeling that she
would not have stayed an artist had she continued to live in Paris.
She lives and works
in New York City.
She is best known
for her 'Cells', 'Spiders' and various drawings, books and
sculptures. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them
in symbolic terms with the main focus being "relationships" -
considering an entity in relation to its surroundings. Louise
Bourgeois finds inspiration for her works from her childhood: her
adulterous father, who had an affair with her governess (who resided
in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge it. She
claims that she has been the "striking-image" of her father since
birth. Bourgeois conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy,
but with playfulness. In her sculpture, she has worked in many
different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and
appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers,
fabric. Some of her pieces consisted of erotic and sexual images,
with a motif of "cumuls" (she named the round figures such because
they reminded her of cumulus clouds). Her most famous works are
possibly the spider structures, titled Maman, from the last dozen
years. Maman now stands outside Tate Modern in London. A similar
sculpture was featured at an art exhibition in the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum.
Her earliest
exhibition, in 1947, consisted of tunnel sculptures and wooden
figures, including The Winged Figure (1948). Despite early success
in that show, with one of the works being purchased for the Museum
of Modern Art, Bourgeois was subsequently ignored by the art market
during the fifties and sixties. It was in the seventies, after the
deaths of her husband and father, that she became a successful
artist.
In 1993 she
represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. In 1999 she
participated in the Melbourne International Biennial 1999. Also in
1999, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the
Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.
