Louise Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was born in Paris on 25 December 1911 and died in New York on 31 May 2010. She studied at the Sorbonne and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before relocating permanently to New York in 1938, following her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater. That transatlantic passage — from the intellectual and artistic culture of interwar Paris to the restless energy of mid-century New York — would prove formative, shaping a practice that resisted easy categorisation and continued to evolve across seven decades.

Bourgeois worked across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and installation, building a body of work whose emotional and psychological intensity has secured her a singular place in the history of modern and contemporary art. Her prints and illustrated books constitute a particularly rich strand of her output: the authoritative scholarly reference for this area is Deborah Wye's Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017, which superseded an earlier 1994 catalogue. MoMA also maintains an online catalogue raisonné devoted to her printed production, covering approximately 35,000 items made during her lifetime and serving as the principal digital resource for researchers and specialists. Works by Bourgeois are held in major institutional collections, including the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Her gallery relationships have been sustained and international in scope. Galerie Karsten Greve, with spaces in Cologne, Paris, and Saint-Moritz, has represented Bourgeois since 1990 — a relationship inaugurated with a solo exhibition in Cologne that year and continuing with further solo presentations, most recently in Cologne in 2026. Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris has also mounted significant solo exhibitions of her work, including Triptych for the Red Room in 2018 and I do, I undo, I redo in 2024, while Xavier Hufkens in Brussels presented Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Drawings and Recent Sculptures. The breadth of this gallery activity reflects the enduring international demand for her work well into the years following her death.

Scholarly and institutional attention to Bourgeois shows no sign of diminishing. Hauser & Wirth is presenting Gathering Wool, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, a focused exhibition of late sculptures, reliefs, and works on paper — including previously unexhibited pieces — running across 2025 and 2026. Looking further ahead, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Pompidou are co-presenting Extrême tension. Dessins et gravures, a major exhibition devoted to her drawings and prints, from 20 October 2026 to 21 February 2027. In 2025, the Observer counted Bourgeois among the women artists leading the New York gallery fall season — a measure of how persistently her work commands critical and public attention.