With a career that spanned eight decades, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century. Born in France and working in America from 1938 until her death, she is best known for her sculptural work, though also worked with painting, drawing, printmaking and performance. Her emotionally and psychologically charged works are rooted in introspection, calling on personal memories and experiences, especially her troubled childhood. This sculpture, made before Bourgeois achieved international recognition in the 1980s, is one of several innovative pieces that mark a transitional moment as she moved away from abstraction towards a figurative exploration of erotic themes. Its ambiguous form appears at once abstract and representational, male and female, maternal yet vulnerable. It succeeds her abstract free-standing ‘personages’, which obliquely reference the human figure, and prefigures her ‘part-objects’, in which fragmented male and female body parts are dominant motifs.