Louise Bourgeois

“Every day,” Louise Bourgeois said, “you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” For her, making art entails trying to translate experience into form—an operation that she compares with exorcism. In Bourgeois’s works on view in these galleries, organic formations fuse with the inorganic materiality of the media in which they are rendered, be it marble, wood, or bronze. The artist’s repertoire of materials spans traditional media and new textures, such as latex and synthetic resin.