Louise Bourgeois

Drawings 1947 – 2007

25 March 2020

Online Exhibition

Born in 1911, Bourgeois began drawing at a young age – as a girl, her skills allowed her to assist at her parents’ tapestry restoration business, where she helped design and draw templates for fabrics in need of repair. Years later, drawing became a way of chronicling her inner thoughts and anxieties. Like her clothing, which Bourgeois considered a kind of diary marking significant events from her past, so too her drawings were a record, over time, of feelings and reactions to the world around her. Sometimes these were highly conscious exercises in controlling and quieting her anxiety, at other times they were more visceral meanderings and repetitions of mark and line. Her creative process has always been fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. For her, drawing was a way to pinpoint and alleviate psychic tension: ‘When I draw it means that something bothers me, but I don’t know what it is. So it is the treatment of anxiety’.

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About the Artist

Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic...

Current Exhibitions