Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) used to say "painting doesn't exist for me". She has nevertheless always been strongly attached to the engraved or drawn image, recording in her diaries the visual ideas that appeared to her and which, in her own words, she caught like flies in flight.
Woven together with numerous autobiographical elements, her work bears witness to a close relationship between memory and recollection that wavers, fades and stretches thin. Like her sculptures, with their shapeless, organic materials, her engraved work explores the ambiguity of the forms issuing from her fantasy-laced memories. This interplay of back and forth, conducive to the engraver's art, is particularly evident in her "Sainte Sébastienne", a feminine reinterpretation of the figure of the famous martyr pierced by arrows. In 1990, Bourgeois began the first version and would return to it several times, cropping the image, even using photocopying to develop her composition and/or transfer it to a copper plate.
