‘Woman with Packages’ (1987 – 1993) reflects Louise Bourgeois’s deeply personal and all-encompassing approach to sculpture. The motif developed over a span of five decades, materializing in her famous Personage sculptures during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and later appearing in reimagined form in the mid-1980s, in bronze. Yet the marble version carries special emotional charge: to Bourgeois, the process of carving stone was highly cathartic, allowing her to release her anxieties and aggression through the material. Each line contain the artist’s intense spirit and indefatigable passion.  ‘Woman with Packages’ is quintessential Bourgeois: a highly physical and deeply personal rumination on gender, the body, and the cyclical nature of life.   

Combining Bourgeois’s characteristic organic forms with naturalistic precision, ‘Woman with Packages’ offers a remarkable fusion of two stylistic tendencies. The figure’s teardrop-shaped form, which recurs throughout her oeuvre, tapers smoothly at the base and is reminiscent of her early Personages. In contrast, the packages and the woman’s head are rendered with virtuosic precision—a distinctive feature in many of Bourgeois’s marble sculptures. To achieve this effect, Bourgeois measured her own proportions and mapped them onto the sculpture’s head. She then chiseled the stone, channeling her emotion through the sculpture—an often-aggressive process that is reminiscent of her approach to carving her wooden Personages forty years earlier. The resulting figure is unmistakably Classical in appearance, with delicately modelled features that slip smoothly into rough-hewn hair. This contrast between traditional sculptural techniques and simplified, biomorphic forms recalls Bourgeois’s ‘Fallen Woman’ sculptures from the early 1980s. Though all of the artist’s work exhibits a notable degree of control over her material, the tactile and highly intimate process of fabricating ‘Woman with Packages’ situates it among her most remarkable sculptures.