Louise Bourgeois Retrospective Opens At Tate Modern

She has worked in many mediums but is primarily a sculptor and has been involved with many avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century, from Surrealism to Conceptual art, from abstraction to using 'ready made' objects in her works.

Bourgeois studied under Fernand Léger in the 30s before moving to New York where, in 1982, she was the first female artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

She gained mainstream recognition in the UK in 1999 as the first artist commissioned to fill Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Hall. Her imposing 30-foot bronze spider (Maman) and towering steel platforms (I Do, I Undo and I Redo) became emblamatic of the new gallery, and providing a dramatic greeting to the crowds that flocked there.

Now Tate Modern is holding the first ever UK retrospective of her work – beginning with some of her earliest drawings, prints and paintings and moving through her creations with wood, marble, rubber, bronze and her most recent works using fabric.

Fabric is, indeed, an appropriate medium for Bourgeois, who came from a family that ran a tapestry restoration business. The warped figures, which she calls Cumuls because of their resemblance to Cumulus Nimbus clouds, are a striking contrast to some of her more angular, geometric sculptures in durable metals or wood.

The show includes over 200 works, from small-scale experimental pieces to her epic installations of the 1980s and 1990s.

Although aware of the many artistic movements she's lived through, Bourgeois has drawn her own path through this timeline. She's developed her own approach and attitude to art, sometimes familial, sometimes womanly, sometimes terrifying. In 2002 when asked about art's future role in an interview in DIE ZEIT magazine, she answered, "Making people see reason".

A bold hope, maybe, but one that all artists should perhaps aspire to. www.24hourmuseum.org.uk