Born 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) she was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a well known 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 unconscious.These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. 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.

She was the second child of three born to parents Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. She had an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries.

Her mother died in 1932, while Bourgeois was studying mathematics. Her mother’s death inspired her to abandon mathematics and to begin studying art. She continued to study art by joining classes where translators were needed for English-speaking students, in which those translators were not charged tuition. In one such class Fernand Leger  saw her work and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter. Bourgeois took a job as a docent, leading tours at the Musee de Louvre.

Louise Bourgeois’s work is powered by confessions, self-portraits, memories, fantasies of a restless being who is seeking through her sculpture a peace and an order which were missing throughout her childhood