Arched figure

Louise Bourgeois is one of the most important female sculptors of the contemporary period. But given her forthright rejection of the label ‘woman artist’, she might better be considered one of the most innovative artists to have emerged in the United States in the second-half of the twentieth century. She left behind a sculptural legacy of rare breadth and intensity, one that took her from the late modernist influences of Surrealism through to her foundational work defining the new century’s fascination with subjectivity, sexuality and the abject.

Bourgeois’ idiosyncratic and fascinating practice spanned seven decades, yet it always projected a singular vision. From her early work – described by Lynne Cooke as having ‘dual threads – one involved with the psychic and corporeal structures of the body, the other with the charged spaces it constructs for mental and physical shelter’ – to her later practice that intensified these enduring preoccupations, she spent decades sharpening our awareness of sensations – from the fleshy to the psychological – that reside beyond the purely visual.

Bourgeois was obsessed by the self and its many relations. With cathartic intensity, she drew upon autobiographical content, particularly her childhood in France and fraught relationship with her parents, to explore the effect that people have on each other. This lithe torso, with its exposed ribcage and jutting hips, suggests a self pushed to physical and psychological extremes. Historical depictions of hysteria and ecstasy often portray women’s bodies contorted like this one. Bourgeois revises that imagery in this arched male body.