Louise Bourgeois
Untitled, 1948
Ink and pencil on paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches (29.2 x 21.6 cm)

In this early drawing, Bourgeois allows linear forms to hover between figuration and abstraction, the spontaneous marks reading like automatic notations of memory and body‑linked motifs. The delicate, almost skeletal lines hold both presence and absence, suggesting an inner logic of the psyche where resolution is always deferred.

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.