1911 in Paris – New York, May 31, 2010: she was a French sculptor and artist, she lived in New York
A narrow corridor leads to a polygonal room whose pattern-like walls are made of doors. Inside is a dense conglomeration of large red and light blue spools on stands, spiraling objects and colorless glass body fragments, two small suitcases, a kerosene lamp, and two bottles filled with coins; a red ladder leans against the wall, and a teardrop-shaped object dangles from one of the spool holders. In one of the doors is a window behind which the word " private " is written in worn letters. The dense atmosphere of Louise Bourgeois's Red Room ( Child ), 1994, is created by the hauntingly enigmatic logic of found objects and artifacts and the informally intangible structures of the luminous red glass spools. Red Room contains many of the motifs and metaphors explored by Louise Bourgeois for decades: the claustrophobic room evoking a hiding place or the inside of the body, parts of Surrealist objects resembling organs, a ladder too short to allow escape from the room, and spools of thread recalling the artist's childhood. The sign reading " private " suggests that it is a place of personal reminiscence and that working with autobiographical elements represents a central process in the artist's creative work. Louise Bourgeois's work, in which the mastery of a formal sculptural vocabulary is inextricably linked to a complex and codified content, has remained open to the projections of her critics, while simultaneously fostering biographical interpretation through numerous verbal and written statements. Thus, the construction of memory becomes a central motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois's family ran a workshop restoring antique tapestries in the French town of Choisy-le-Roi. Recognizing her talent, her parents entrusted her with drawing missing sections in tapestries and creating repair cartoons. Bourgeois then studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. From the mid-1930s, she attended various art schools, eventually landing at Fernand Léger . She married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and in 1938 moved to New York, where she continued her art studies until 1940 at the Art Students League, after which she began painting. One of her first groups of works was Femmes Maison , female figures whose bodies were partly made of a house, a reference to women's social status and their assignment to the domestic territory. Bourgeois explored the same theme in sculpture. From the mid-1940s, she created the so-called Personages , stele-like figures evoking totemic artifacts from tribal cultures, while in the 1950s she created a series of anthropomorphic sculptures consisting of similar elements mounted on a rod, depicting not only objects reminiscent of Brancusi's sculpture, but also minimalist serial principles like those found in the early works of Carl Andre. In the following years, Louise Bourgeois experimented with unusual materials such as latex, rubber, plaster, and concrete. In the early 1960s, she further developed her domestic theme with Lairs - forms fluid , spiral or labyrinthine that typically open onto an empty interior space. Like Lairs , also Her delicate landscapes follow the principles of an organic, anti-formalist approach. An almost fleshy materiality makes latex works like Double Negative , 1963, resemble visceral landscapes in which the interior seems to have been turned inside out. Mushroom-like spherical forms sprout from fluid bases, making unambiguous identification impossible and suggesting instead the multiple breasts of the Artemis of Ephesus, or phallic forms. Like many of Louise Bourgeois's sexually suggestive forms, these are not clearly "male" or "female." Even Filette (Child), 1968—a large phallus made of tin cans with which Louise Bourgeois was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982 in a charmingly provocative pose—hypertrophies the phallic shape in addition to the rotund one.
