With deep sadness, Hauser & Wirth join the Bourgeois family, Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy Williams in mourning the passing of Louise Bourgeois on 31 May 2010. Louise Bourgeois's subject was always her life and experiences. 'Art', she once said, 'is the experiencing – or rather the re-experiencing – of a trauma'. She pioneered a new kind of art in which a multiplicity of forms and materials are used to excite and to exorcise emotions. Through recurrent motifs – body parts, houses, spiders, and skeins of thread, dramatic use of colours and a vast variety of media, Bourgeois developed a deeply potent, personal symbolic code. She was an original thinker who was always at the forefront of new artistic developments yet never directly affiliated with the avant-garde movements of her time. Rather than pursue formalist concerns for their own sake, she experimented to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining such diverse materials as fabric, plaster, latex and bronze with an endless repertoire of found objects. Her 'environments' of the 1950s foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre came to artistic prominence. Through her innovative approach to media and her feminist stance she created a body of work whose distinctive and sensual treatment of forms has proved a major influence to younger generations of artists. Fiercely intelligent and independent, Bourgeois was also a generous person, unstinting in her advice and encouragement to others and an inspiration to all those who knew her. Bourgeois was born in the outskirts of Paris on 25 December 1911, three years before the outbreak of the First World War. At the age of eight she held the role of designer in her parents' tapestry repair company, re-drawing the designs of the textiles where they had worn through. She studied in Paris at the École du Louvre before relocating to the United States in 1938 with her husband Robert Goldwater. It was from the 1950s onwards when Bourgeois – a wife, mother and émigré in America – began her prolific artistic output. 'Eccentric Abstraction', an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard at New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966, brought her work to critical and public attention. Major breakthroughs on the international scene came with the 1982 retrospective of her work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her participation in LOUISE BOURGEOIS 1911 – 2010