In the Studio: Louise Bourgeois

This fascinating introduction to Louise Bourgeois’s influential practice reveals how her studio functioned as a site of creative transformation and emotional catharsis.

Counted among the most significant figures of contemporary art history, Louise Bourgeois produced a complex body of work that explored the full range of human experience. Working in several mediums (including sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, and performance), she created a visual world noted for its singularity and invention. In this latest installment of the In the Studio series, curator Justin Paton—who organized a major 2023–24 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney—charts the trajectory of Bourgeois’s life and seventy-year career, using the places and processes of her artistic practice to illuminate the complex psychological mechanisms behind her unique vocabulary of forms, restless material experimentation, and recurring motifs. Alongside Paton’s comprehensive account of Bourgeois’s work, a selection of Bourgeois’s writings—including some published for the very first time—reveal the myriad ways her motivations and emotions played out in the studio. Accessibly written and richly illustrated, In the Studio: Louise Bourgeois will delight both those familiar with and curious about Bourgeois’s groundbreaking work.