Louise Bourgeois

One of this UK's pre-eminent artists, Louise Bourgeois is a unique figure in contemporary art. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois spent most of her career receiving little recognition from the art community. She has worked closely to many of the century's key artistic moments, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to feminist-inspired art, and yet remains distinct from all these. An extraordinarily influential sculptor, she has worked, often experimentally, with materials varying from alabaster, plaster, latex, bronze, and marble to found objects. She is equally admired for her intimate drawings at times combining fragments of text (featured at Documenta 11, 2002) with her highly personal writings, which often address her long and complex life story. With the combined backdrops of a conflicted family upbringing and her father's tapestry restoring business (whose weaving provides a recurring symbol in her work); her struggles as an artist in a world reserved for men; as well as her experiences as a mother, the subjects of her work are as broad as the materials in which she expresses them. Themes such as the Other, the feminine and the masculine, the body as well as her own specific biography spin a tangled and intense, lifelong body of work of unusual profundity. Bourgeois has presented her work in many of the world's most prestigious museums, including a major one-person exhibition New York's Museum of Modern Art. In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.