Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child

This 2022 exhibition represented the first major retrospective of this legendary artist to focus exclusively on her work using fabrics and textiles.

In the last two decades of her career, Bourgeois began to incorporate clothes from all stages of her life into her art. This developed into a varied body of work – from monumental installations, to figurative sculptures and abstract collages – incorporating textiles such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint.

Bourgeois’s fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation that are central to her long and storied career. Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child summed up this wonderfully inventive and compelling final chapter in this extraordinary artist’s work.

‘Provocative, scary and marvellous’

The Guardian

‘So good it will give you shivers’

The i