"Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said."

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France; d. 2010, New York, USA) was a revolutionary French-American artist whose emotionally charged work explored themes of trauma, anxiety, sexuality, and the body throughout her remarkable seven-decade career. While primarily celebrated for her sculpture and installation work, Bourgeois was also a prolific printmaker who turned increasingly to the medium in her later years, creating some of her most intimate and psychologically revealing work.

Bourgeois began making art in the 1930s but gained widespread recognition only in her seventies, following her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982. Her work defied easy categorization, drawing on elements of Surrealism, Existentialism, and feminist art while remaining deeply personal. Her prints, like her sculptures, often addressed themes of family relationships, motherhood, domesticity, and the subconscious. The artist's late-career renaissance in printmaking resulted in extraordinary bodies of work that continue to grow in critical appreciation and collector interest, revealing the psychological depth and formal innovation that characterized all aspects of her artistic practice.

Maman by Louise Bourgeois, 1999, via Guggenheim Bilbao (left); with Louise Bourgeois inside her articulated air at the MoMA, 1986, via The Guardian