Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American artist. 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 subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Louise Bourgeois’s work is often autobiographical, while addressing universal experiences such as birth, death, love, loss and fear.

The exhibition at Tate Modern brings together a selection of Bourgeois’s late works, alongside a small number of earlier pieces from her remarkable seven-decade career. She was born in Paris in 1911. Her parents ran a business restoring antique tapestries, which sparked her life-long interest in textiles. Though she initially studied mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne, she soon changed direction and trained as an artist. In 1938 she moved to New York City, where she remained until her death in 2010.

Bourgeois returned again and again to a number of themes, though the materials she used to express them vary greatly. Her sculpture, drawing and writing are characterized by an unflinching emotional honesty, as she continually retold and reworked the memories and stories that shaped her life.

[via Tate and wikipedia]