Bourgeois's early work focused on painting and printmaking, but she also began to explore sculpture in the late 1940s. During the 1950s and early 1960s, she underwent a lengthy period of psychoanalysis, during which her artistic production became more sporadic. Her extensive reading of psychoanalytic theory would go on to become a key filter for her work. In 1964, after a long hiatus, Bourgeois presented strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures that contrasted dramatically with the totemic wood pieces she had exhibited earlier. Alternating between different forms, materials, scale, and even figuration and abstraction, became a basic part of Bourgeois’s working practice, even while she continued to explore the same key themes.

Bourgeois built an extraordinary body of work through the exploration of trauma, the female experience, and the unconscious, often through the lens of her own personal history and relationships. Incorporating elements of domesticity, motherhood, sexuality, and the body, her art offered a deeply personal perspective that was not initially embraced by an art establishment more concerned with questions of formal issues. This would change in 1982, following a solo retrospective at MoMA at the age of seventy. She enjoyed the vast majority of her success in the final three decades of her life before her death in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.