Aziz Art January 2019

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois 25
December 1911 – 31 May 2010
was a French-American artist.
Although she is best known for
her large-scale sculpture and
installation art, Bourgeois was also
a prolific 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
subconscious.
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.
Early life
Bourgeois was born on 25
December 1911 in Paris, France.
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. A few years
after her birth, her family moved
out of Paris and set up a workshop
for tapestry restoration below their
apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for
which Bourgeois filled in the
designs where they had become
worn.
The lower part of the tapestries
were always damaged which was
usually the characters' feet and
animals' paws. Many of Bourgeois's
works have extremely fragile and
frail feet which could be a result of
the former.
In 1930, Bourgeois entered the
Sorbonne to study mathematics
and geometry, subjects that she
valued for their stability, saying "I
got peace of mind, only through
the study of rules nobody could
change."
Her mother died in 1932, while
Bourgeois was studying
mathematics. Her mother's death
inspired her to abandon
mathematics and to begin studying
art.
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