Mistress of anguish, 91-year-old French born American artist Louise Bourgeois, has brought a small taste of abstract expressionism to Bermuda's ACE Gallery.

Labelled a feminist icon and occasionally a minimalist, Bourgeois illuminates the fears and hidden demons saturating and gnawing through the cavernous depths of a tormented soul.

The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, has honoured her work for some years and a receptive Russian audience continues to embrace the strong, social vocabulary within her work.

Bermuda is now lucky enough to experience some of this language, conveyed through her sculptures, lithographs and drawings.

Arachnophobics should be warned.

Walking into the ACE Gallery you can't help but notice the bronze sculpture of ‘Spider IV', 1996, an intimidating, giant mutant spider appearing to crawl up the wall.

This gnarled, exaggerated image amplifies the artist's own personal ghosts and lends itself to the fears and shadows of the specters found lurking in dreams, the gremlins one can almost visualise but dare not see.

Similarly this kind of approach is taken by Francis Bacon in the sense that he explores his own past, slowly opening a Pandora's Box of fragmented images mirrored by the irrevocable consequence of an afflicted past.

Throughout many of her pieces Bourgeois has used a spider as a metaphor for foresight, labour and the role of femininity within society.

Most notably, her work had critics and viewers excitedly chatting all over London at the grand opening of the Tate Modern in May, 2000.

Her several massive pieces adorned the gargantuan Turbine Hall.

One of them was a ten-metre high pregnant spider entitled ‘Maman' (French for mother), now found at The Winter Palace in Russia (home of The State Hermitage Museum), and three other pieces resembling giant towers decorated at the top with mirrors, all explored the nature of femininity.

Bourgeois' work is deeply symbolic, abstract and full of energetic, spiky representations.

She is deeply haunted by her early years.

Concentrating on the relationship she had with her parents, particularly the double standards set by her father, she amalgamates this with the role that sexuality played in her young life as a way for her to make sense of her past.

She literally sculpts and moulds history in her own deviated interpretation.

Angst-ridden and at times described as being reclusive, these tensions are explored through different forms, medium and matter, which are a kind of code to her.

Through these images she is able to change their shape and exaggerate her own fears and ideas, building a picture of the worries and troubles lurking in the shadows of a woman's mind, which is where the dark fascination begins.

Some of her past works entitled ‘Imprisonment', ‘Escape', ‘Secret' and ‘Exposed' seem to illustrate the idea of art evolving as a symptom of unsatisfied desires.

Although her sculptures jolt the senses of most viewers, unfortunately I did not find that her drawings produced the same effect.

There was a kind of naivety to some of the lines and interpretations, perhaps because she hasn't totally moved away from some of the childhood images still preoccupying her.

Denoting female sexuality, she depicts a cat arching its back and wearing kitten-heeled shoes. After observing it for some time it does produce mixed messages to the viewer and in this sense it is a very different way of posing questions on sexuality.

In a piece entitled ‘Couples' (colour lithograph), three sets of couples are each bound tightly together in what appears to be a coil winding around them, somehow crushing them so tightly that although united and entwined by its confines, they seem crushed by it or trapped, giving way to a suffocating image.

The concept of repressed desires is also explored here.

The women are pictured as the more dominant species with high-heeled red shoes and bushy blood-red hair, while the men look grey and wan.

The paradoxes in the act of love and betrayal are recurring themes throughout her work.

During her early years she studied under the instruction of Fernand L?ger, a man synonymous with the cubist movement, and empathised with surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp.

The mechanical aestheticism associated with some of L?ger's later work of the purist movement is evident in some of her pieces.

She uses bronze in a mechanical way to unleash the hidden anguish saturating her soul, sculpting figurines into ghoulish, nightmarish forms.

Although she started out as a painter and engraver, Bourgeois became interested in sculpture, particularly in the 1940s, becoming intrigued with European surrealist artists.

I think that what is special about her work is that she is able to convey how she feels through using a wide range of materials, not just one preferred medium. She has worked with stone, metal and even latex and remains unabashed at using size to magnify her torments.

She is recognised as a leader of 20th Century sculpture.