Louise Bourgeois
Germinal, 1967-92
White marble
5 1/2 x 7 3/8 x 6 1/4 inches (14 x 18.7 x 15.9 cm)

Germinal condenses Bourgeois’s long engagement with body symbolism into a compact, white marble form where breast and phallic imagery merge into a singular, ambiguous whole. The cool permanence of the stone intensifies this duality, making corporeal form feel at once archetypal and unresolved in its convergence of male and female markers.

about the artist

Louise Bourgeois occupies a pivotal place in 20th-century art, her work bridging Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and feminist interventions with a singularly psychological lens. Across sculpture, drawing, and installation, Bourgeois explored the body, memory, and domestic space, transforming intimate experience into monumental forms that confronted trauma, desire, and the unconscious. Historically, she challenged the presumed neutrality of modernist abstraction, asserting that emotional and corporeal experience could be the organizing principle of form, and in doing so laid the groundwork for generations of artists engaging with identity, sexuality, and affect in both figurative and abstract registers.