About

Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s most respected sculptors. Over a long career she has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art.

This major survey, in the artist’s 95th year, provides an unprecedented opportunity to reassess her work, which is characterised by its obsessive subject matter and experimental approach to materials and techniques.

The Destruction of the Father 1974
Plaster, latex, wood, fabric and red light
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Rafael Lobato
Beginning with her earliest drawings, prints and paintings, the show features over 200 works in materials as diverse as latex, bronze, marble, and mirrors, as well as her most recent works using fabric. It’s also another chance to see Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman 1999, which was shown in the Turbine Hall when the gallery opened in 2000.

This exhibition explores Bourgeois’s core themes of femininity, sexuality and isolation, and demonstrates that even in her 90s she continues to defy convention.