Artist: Louise Bourgeois
Title: Hamlet and Ophelia
Medium: Lithograph in Colors
Size: 29.625" h x 42" W
Edition: 21/50, printed by SOLO Impression, New York and published by Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
Inscription: Signed, dated and numbered on front lower right
Year: 1997
Documentation: Gallery certificate of authenticity
"Hamlet and Ophelia" is a 1997 color lithograph by Louise Bourgeois that reflects the artist's continued exploration of emotional intensity, psychological dualities, and complex interpersonal dynamics. The work exemplifies Bourgeois' late-career printmaking, where she revisits enduring themes through refined and expressive means.
Drawing on characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the composition alludes to themes of love, betrayal, madness, and loss—motifs that resonate deeply with Bourgeois' broader body of work. Rather than illustrating a literal scene, the image evokes the psychological undercurrents of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, emphasizing mood and symbolic form over narrative depiction.
Bourgeois employs gestural mark-making and rich color to convey emotional intensity. The figures or forms may appear abstracted or suggestive, in keeping with her interest in the body as a vessel of experience and memory. As in much of her practice, the work blurs the boundary between the personal and the archetypal, inviting viewers to engage with its psychological and emotional dimensions.
Measuring 29.625 by 42 inches, the work was printed by SOLO Impression in New York and published by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of a limited edition of 50. This impression is number 21 in the series and is signed, dated, and numbered by the artist in the lower right corner. Purchase of Bourgeois' "Hamlet and Ophelia" is accompanied by a gallery certificate of authenticity.
About Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois is a French-American artist whose work transforms personal memory, emotional conflict, and the complexities of identity into powerful sculptural forms. Over a career that spans more than seven decades, Bourgeois develops a deeply symbolic visual language that explores themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, motherhood, and the subconscious.
Born in Paris on December 25, 1911, Bourgeois grows up in a household centered around her family's tapestry restoration business. She assists in the studio from a young age, learning techniques that later resurface in her art, particularly in her fabric-based works. The emotional turbulence of her early life, including her mother's long illness and her father's infidelities, forms a foundation for much of her later work. She uses art not as a form of decoration, but as a means of processing psychological pain.
Originally trained in mathematics, Bourgeois shifts her focus to art in the 1930s, studying at prestigious Parisian institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1938, she marries American art historian Robert Goldwater and moves to New York, where she becomes part of the city's emerging postwar art scene.
Though she begins exhibiting in the 1940s, Bourgeois works outside the prevailing movements of the time, including Abstract Expressionism. Her early sculptures are carved wooden totems and organic forms that reflect her interest in Surrealism and the body. She later expands her materials to include bronze, latex, marble, and fabric, continually shifting between abstraction and figuration. Her work resists categorization and often feels intensely autobiographical.
A major breakthrough in recognition comes in 1982, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York presents a retrospective of her work—the first solo exhibition MoMA ever gives to a woman artist. The show marks a turning point, bringing her psychological and formally daring work to the attention of a broader audience.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Bourgeois creates some of her most iconic pieces. Among them is the monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999), which towers over 30 feet tall. The spider represents both strength and fragility, as well as her mother's role as a weaver and protector. With its towering legs and sac of marble eggs, Maman embodies the duality that runs through much of her work—comfort and menace, love and fear, vulnerability and control.
Bourgeois frequently returns to recurring motifs such as spirals, cages, suspended figures, and fragmented body parts. In her later years, she works extensively with fabric, often cutting up her own clothing and linens to create soft sculptures that suggest both intimacy and repair. These sewn works link back to her childhood in the tapestry studio and speak to the feminine labor of care and mending.
She continues to make and exhibit work until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Even in her final years, Bourgeois maintains a rigorous studio practice and welcomes younger artists into her home for dialogue and critique.
Today, Louise Bourgeois is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work is held in major museum collections around the world and continues to influence artists exploring themes of identity, memory, and the emotional dimensions of form. Her art stands as a fearless and unflinching investigation of the human condition.
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