Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)
He Disappeared into Complete Silence (second edition), 1947/2005
Illustrated book with eleven unbound engravings, six with watercolor additions (ten over photogravure, six with drypoint, five with aquatint, and one with embossing)
10 1/16 x 6 11/16 inches, sheet
10 9/16 x 7 9/16 x 5/8 inches, box
Edition of 30
Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris; d. 2010, New York) is recognized as one of the most important figures of modern and contemporary art. Growing up her parents owned an antique tapestry gallery and her mother ran a tapestry restoration workshop, exposing Bourgeois to art, craft, and textiles at a young age. She studied at the Sorbonne, originally majoring in math. Her mother’s passing in 1932 inspired her transition to artmaking.
Bourgeois began her career with a focus on painting and printmaking before turning to sculpture in the late 1940s. During this period and into the early 1950s, she created a sculptural series Personages, totem-like free standing sculptures referencing the human figure and urban landscape. Described by Bourgeois as her first truly mature artistic effort, the sculptures functioned as surrogates for friends and family departed or remaining in France, while emphasizing her life-long interest in architecture. Installed without bases, the vertical forms inhabited the room in clusters, an arrangement Bourgeois considered critical to the presentation of the work. They form an immersive environment in which a reconstruction of her past was conjured through the sculptures.
Bourgeois’s work is inextricably linked with her life experiences, including ruminations on early childhood trauma and examinations of female sexuality, often evoking figures such as the Father, Mother, Child, and Lover. Her oeuvre employs a variety of genres, media and materials, veering between figuration and abstraction while playing upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.
Her work was included in Lucy Lippard’s seminal 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, at Fischbach Gallery, New York. Bourgeois was the subject of a 1982 Museum of Modern Art retrospective curated by Deborah Wye, marking the first retrospective of her career. Nine years later, she was chosen to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 2001, she became the first living American artist to be the subject of a retrospective at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Her work is held in the collections of Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
PoMo, Trondheim, Norway, Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning, February 5–May 31, 2026.
Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, Louise Bourgeois: In Private View, September 27, 2025–May 17, 2026.
Hoam Museum of Art, Seoul, Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal, August 30, 2025–January 4, 2026.
Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Rocking to Infinity, September 2–October 26, 2025.
The Courtauld, London, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s, June 20–September 14, 2025.
Selected Group Exhibitions
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today, April 25–September 6, 2026.
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Miró and the United States, March 21–July 5, 2026.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, United Kingdom, Crossing Into Darkness, January 18–April 12, 2026.
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, The Woman Question 1550–2025, November 21, 2025–May 3, 2026.
MoMu Fashion Museum Antwerp, Belgium, GIRLS. On Boredom, Rebellion, and Being In-Between, September 27, 2025–February 1, 2025.
Selected Publications
Rollig, Stella, Sabine Fellner, and Johanna Hofer. Louise Bourgeois: Persistent Antagonism. Austria: Belvedere, Wein, 2023.
Louise Bourgeois: Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day? Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023.
Holzer, Jenny, and Anita Haldemann. Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page, Geneva: JRP|EDITIONS, 2022.
Davies, Claire, and Briony Fer. Louise Bourgeois: Paintings. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022.
Larratt-Smith, Philip, and Juliet Mitchell. Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
