Perhaps most noted for her biomorphic forms and emotionally resonant sculptural work, French American artist Louise Bourgeois approached artmaking as a cathartic and therapeutic process, remarking that “Art is a guaranty of sanity.” After earning a degree in mathematics from the Sorbonne, Paris, she shifted her attention to the visual arts and studied painting and printmaking at the École des Beaux-Arts and other Parisian ateliers. It was in the late 1940s—around the time she created the painting on view in this exhibition—that Bourgeois began to experiment with sculpture, developing motifs drawn from childhood memories that would become central to her later installations and three-dimensional works.
Bourgeois rose to international prominence for her sculptural work relatively late in her career. Her first retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1982 and was notably the museum’s first retrospective dedicated to a female artist. Her accolades include the Grand Prix National de Sculpture, awarded by the French government in 1991, and the National Medal of Arts, presented by the President of the United States in 1997.
