Louise Bourgeoise

A dining table with a dysfunctional family in the early 1920s: a little girl who decided to stop listening to the bigoted and condescending speeches of her domineering father. Between her fingers she formed little sculptures of bread representing her father, and then … she would bang her fist on the table and destroy them. – Family relationships were always an important theme for the sculptor, painter and graphic artist, who was born in Paris in 1911. Bourgeoise, who began working as an artist after studying mathematics at the Sorbonne. With works such as “The Destruction of the Father”, “The Reluctant Child” or “Mamam”, a huge spider sculpture with which she alluded to her mother’s profession as a restorer of tapestries, Bourgeoise processed her childhood experiences. After her studies, she moved to New York in 1949, where she first exhibited drawings and later her sculptures. After her first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, she received international attention. She died in New York in 2010. In 2022, Bourgeoise had a major retrospective entitled The Woven Child at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. The exhibition featured her extensive textile research as well as several large-scale sculptures, collages and drawings.