Louise Bourgeois

Since her historic retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, Louis Bourgeois has been widely acknowledged as one of the most important artists of our time. Working in a variety of media and styles, she continues to astound viewers with her restless imagination and her powerful command of a unique artistic vocabulary. The Arts Club of Chicago is especially gratified to be able to present this selection of recent sculptures, along with the Insomnia Series drawings, done from 1994 to 1995, the entire series exhibited here for the first time. The sculptures contain clothes from different periods in her life. Bourgeois saved these garments over the years, remembering who gave them to her, where she wore them, and who she was with at the time.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. The family business was tapestry restoration, and as a child, Louise’s first drawings were of body parts– arms, legs– for the missing fragments in old tapestries. As a young woman, she studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. Her formal artistic training began at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and concluded at the Art Students League in New York after her immigration in 1938. Married to American historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois became a citizen in 1951, rearing three sons while establishing a career in an artworld not readily accepting of women. Her success is still cause for celebration, for she serves as a paradigm of professional commitment as well as a model of forceful creativity for a new generation of artists.