Louise Bourgeois’s Woman House (Femme Maison) confronts notions of femininity and domesticity. She depicts a nude female figure whose upper half has been replaced by a large house, revisiting woman/house hybrid imagery that she first explored through a series of works in the mid-1940s.

The ordered structure of the architecture clashes with the organic forms of the body, creating a dissonance that evokes the struggles of women in the domestic sphere. For many women of the time, the home could be a refuge as well as a prison. Yet, Bourgeois’s work remains playful, with the figure raising one of its diminutive arms to wave at the viewer.