Rose (2002) is a lithograph in red, on wove paper. Initialed in red felt-tip pen and penciled from an edition of 20, published by SOLO Impression, New York. An edition of 'Rose' was acquired by the MoMa (edition 11 of 20) shortly after its creation.

Louise Bourgeois (b.1911 - d.2010, French-American) was a pioneering French-American artist whose work spanned sculpture, installation, painting, and printmaking. Born in Paris, Bourgeois studied at esteemed institutions including the Sorbonne, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the École du Louvre, and the École des Beaux-Arts before relocating to New York in the late 1940s with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater.

Bourgeois’ deeply personal and psychological work is often associated with the Confessional Art movement, which she helped define. Her oeuvre is characterized by a profound engagement with memory, identity, sexuality, and trauma, often rooted in her own childhood experiences, family dynamics, and relationships. Prints and works on paper provided Bourgeois with a crucial medium for exploring these themes, while her sculptures and installations allowed her to manipulate scale, form, and space to evoke visceral emotional responses.

Bourgeois frequently experimented with a wide range of printmaking techniques, including etching, aquatint, and especially lithography. Lithographs offered her a versatile platform to translate the complex symbolism of her sculptures into two dimensions, capturing both fine detail and expressive gestural marks. Through lithography, she explored repetition, layering, and the interplay of positive and negative space, creating works that are at once delicate, intimate, and psychologically charged. Many of these prints feature motifs recurrent in her sculptures—spiders, hands, fragmented bodies, and organic forms- allowing her to extend the emotional resonance of her three-dimensional work into the realm of paper.

Despite Bourgeois’ early contributions to modern and contemporary art, widespread recognition came later in her career. In 1981, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, held a retrospective of her work, and in 1993, Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Tate Modern honoured her with a major retrospective in 2007, reinforcing her status as one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bourgeois was awarded France’s highest honour, the Legion of Honour, in 1998. Her legacy endures through her raw, introspective approach to form and material, which continues to resonate with contemporary audiences and artists alike.