Louise Bourgeois

Born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911, Louise Bourgeois spent decades as a painter and printmaker before the art world caught up to what she'd been circling: domesticity as battleground, sexuality as raw fact, death and the unconscious given physical weight. Her childhood became her quarry - she mined it for forms, called the process therapeutic, and never stopped. Though she showed alongside the Abstract Expressionists and shared territory with Surrealism and feminist art, she refused formal allegiance to any camp. The large-scale sculptures and installations that made her name arrived late, but they arrived unmistakably: structures you could enter, steel and fabric holding memory's shape. She worked until her death in New York on the last day of May 2010, having spent nearly a century making private ghosts into public encounters.