Her first one-woman exhibitions were of paintings, and she has long been celebrated as a sculptor; however, between 1939 and 1949, and then again from 1973 to the present, Louise Bourgeois has also produced more than 150 prints. They address the same political and aesthetic issues as her works in other media.

Bourgeois was born in Paris and started helping as a child in the family's tapestry-restoration workshop. After graduating from the Sorbonne with a degree in mathematics, she entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1936. Quickly seeing that the school was too conservative for her taste, Bourgeois spent three years studying privately with various artists. At 27, she married American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York City.

During her first decade in New York, Bourgeois experimented with drawings, paintings, and prints, while taking classes at the Art Students League and raising three sons. She met art-world luminaries, including important surrealist and abstract expressionist artists; by the 1950s she had begun concentrating on making sculpture.

Bourgeois's art explores opposite qualities: light/dark, rough/smooth, male/female; it refers to strong emotions, often tied to sexuality. Bourgeois says she creates art to externalize, examine, and thus control her own emotions. Unpleasant thoughts-especially ones about her father, who had a 10-year affair with the family's English nanny-become bearable and pleasant thoughts easier to re-experience when embodied by her work.

Although she had been showing her art for many decades, Bourgeois's oeuvre first received recognition after her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Since then, her sculptures have been displayed throughout Europe and the United States, and a catalogue raisonné of her prints has reawakened interest in Bourgeois's two-dimensional work. The artist was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale of 1993.