Tate Modern, London
-
Louise Bourgeois’s work is often autobiographical, while addressing universal experiences such as birth, death, love, loss and fear.
This exhibition 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 characterised by an unflinching emotional honesty, as she continually retold and reworked the memories and stories that shaped her life.
Louise Bourgeois is the first artist to be presented in the new gallery dedicated to ARTISTROOMS. Located on Level 4 of the Switch House, the space has been designed exclusively to present a programme of solo exhibitions of work by the forty artists in the ARTISTROOMS collection.