Dorset Museum in Dorchester is celebrating the work of Louise Bourgeois with a stunning exhibition featuring some of her most important late works.

The acclaimed French-American artist is widely recognised as one of the most important figures of modern and contemporary art. This is the first time that a major presentation of Bourgeois' work will be shown in Dorset and is now open at the museum in Dorchester town centre.

The exhibition includes highlights from the ARTIST ROOMS national collection, jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, such as the cage-like installation Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000.

The artist's iconic Spider I 1995, which climbs the museum's entrance hall walls, is one of several important loans from The Easton Foundation, featured alongside further key loans from the Artist Rooms Foundation and Tate.

The exhibition ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois brings together a collection of her inventive and expressive work, which encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, textiles, and printmaking.

Often biographical, Bourgeois's work explores themes including childhood, family, motherhood, gender, and identity.

Elizabeth Selby, interim director of Dorset Museum, said: "'We are excited to have this unique exhibition presented for the first time in Dorset, displaying works by one of the most celebrated modern artists of the 20th century.

"Thanks to this partnership with ARTIST ROOMS, Louise Bourgeois's artworks from the collections of Tate and National Galleries of Scotland can be enjoyed by our visitors in Dorset and further afield."

Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois settled in New York in 1938, where she remained for the rest of her life, continuing to make art until her death at the age of 98. 

In a career that spanned most of the avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century, Bourgeois stayed true to her unique vision. Her endlessly inventive work, inspired by her memories and experiences, spanned monumental installations, figurative sculptures, fabric collages, and drawings.

She is perhaps best known for the large-scale spider sculptures that she produced in the last decades of her life, including one she created for the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.

ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois focuses on works produced during the last 20 years of her life, a period of extraordinary creativity, during which Bourgeois re-examined many of her lifelong concerns to create a body of powerful and provocative new work, exploring identity, gender, childhood, family relationships, and memory. 

Her use of textiles, including age-worn garments from her household and personal history, imbues her late sculptures with a sense of intimacy and mortality. 

Bourgeois' art was closely bound up with her life, and she used art-making as a way to make sense of her experiences. Her sculpture, drawing, and writing are characterised by emotional honesty, as she retold the memories and stories that shaped her life, reworking her ideas in different forms and materials including marble, bronze, latex, and fabric, compelled by the need to make and re-make.

Personal, provocative, vulnerable, and raw, Bourgeois' work reaches us with a powerful immediacy more than a decade after her death.

ARTIST ROOMS presents the work of international artists in solo exhibitions, drawn from a national touring collection jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The programme is shown across the UK with the support of the Art Fund, Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England, and Creative Scotland.

ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois will be opening at Dorset Museum until June 25. The exhibition is free with an entrance ticket to the museum. 

Tickets are £14 for adults for day entry or £35 for an annual pass. For more details, visit dorsetmuseum.org