Louise Bourgeois
- Christie Rose
- Oct 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 2
Where/when:
French- American, 1911- 2010
Medium(s):
Large-scale sculpture
Installation art
Painting
Printmaking
Impact:
With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois 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.
I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body. -Louise Bourgeois
Project/activities:
Do you keep a diary or journal? Or do you write 'to do' lists or write things down that you want to remember?
Pick out phrases or words that are important from your writing.
How would you use these in an artwork to add meaning?
Think about these quotes by Louise Bourgeois and how they relate to her artworks.
Look at her use of language in artworks such as Home for Runaway Girls and I Am Afraid. Identify when you feel she is being didactic (teaching or instructing us about something), ironic (sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek), or moralising.
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