This two-volume set presents The Insomnia Drawings, a series Louise Bourgeois created between 1994 and 1995 during sleepless nights, capturing thoughts, memories, and visual ideas as they surfaced. Across 220 works, Bourgeois combines drawings, NOTES:, poems, and everyday reflections in both French and English, offering a direct look into the themes and motifs that shaped her larger practice. The first volume reproduces each drawing—front and back—while the second provides context, scholarship, and full transcriptions that help situate the series within her broader body of work.

With contributions from Marie-Louise Bernadac and Elisabeth Bronfen, the edition outlines how the drawings connect to Bourgeois’ recurring ideas and places the project in a wider cultural view of insomnia and creative process. Housed in a paperbound slipcased format, the set acts as both an archival record and an accessible entry point into the artist’s world.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French American artist whose work spanned sculpture, drawing, installation, and printmaking, often exploring themes of memory, family, the body, and psychological tension. Emerging as a major figure in late-20th-century art, she became widely recognized for her large-scale sculptures—most famously her spider forms—which symbolized protection, vulnerability, and complex personal histories. Throughout her decades-long career, Bourgeois blended abstraction and figuration in ways that deeply influenced contemporary art and continue to resonate with new generations of viewers.

Text by Marie-Laure Bernadac, Elisabeth Bronfen.