Louise Bourgeois (b. Paris, 1911, d. New York, 2010) is one of the most influential artists of the past century. Using the body as a primary form, she explored the full range of human experience. From intimate drawings to large-scale installations, created from a variety of materials including wood, plaster, marble, and bronze, Bourgeois expressed psychological states through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents. For her, the creative process was a kind of exorcism: a way of reconstructing and diffusing memories and emotions. Themes of love, fear, guilt, abandonment, and reconciliation are at the core of her complex body of work.

Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors include the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts in 1997; and the French medal of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 2008. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1999 was awarded the Biennale’s Golden Lion for a living master of contemporary art. Bourgeois’s work has been the subject of several major traveling retrospectives, including those organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Tate Modern, London; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

The skateboard art collection was released on 12th April 2022, in tandem with a solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Photo (top): Claudio Edinger; Art: © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY.
Photo (left): Adar Yosef, courtesy The Easton Foundation