"Eyes", 1996.
Dry point engraving on paper
Louise Bourgeois is one of the most relevant artists of recent decades, a living history of twentieth-century art and the first woman to whom MoMA dedicated a retrospective. Her work encompasses a wide variety of artistic media such as sculpture, installation, drawing, and graphic work. Her work cannot be ascribed to a specific artistic movement or language, although we can find connections with surrealism and feminist movements. Throughout her extensive career, she addressed themes related to the body and sexuality, death and filial relationships, revolving around a common axis: the human body and the need for protection in an environment of violence. In this work "Eyes," Bourgeois uses the eye, a recurring motif in surrealism and common in the artist's iconography, both as a symbol of the act of perception and as an allusion to female anatomy.