Fils de louise bourgeois biography

Louise Bourgeois’ parents had a tapestry gallery in Paris and her mother ran a workshop for the restoration of tapestries in Choisy-le-Roi. Bourgeois’ exposure to art, craft, and textiles informed her work, be it drawing, painting, sculpture or her own inquiry into the fiber arts.

The early work in Bourgeois’ oeuvre served as a cathartic transformation of trauma stemming from her father’s affairs, then the death of her mother, both of which she interpreted as abandonment.

Fils de louise bourgeois biography death

Her personal experience thrust her into a need to express and mutate the general uneasiness she felt in life into art that addressed the body and its vulnerability. She was especially upset and compelled by the death of her father.

But her later work dealt primarily with the role of the mother generally and her mother specifically.

The large spider sculptures that are unmistakably the work of Bourgeois, she associated with her mother, or all mothers, as both predator and protector.