‘Knife Couple’ (1949) is an extraordinary work from Louise Bourgeois’s renowned series, the Personages, which she created between the late 1940s and early 1950s. This seminal group of sculptures heralded a new chapter of unprecedented artistic expression in Bourgeois’s oeuvre. Considered to be her first mature sculptural works, the Personages express Bourgeois’s sense of psychological loss and guilt in the wake of the Second World War, which began soon after she moved from Paris to New York. Like the rest of the Personages, ‘Knife Couple’ was intentionally created with roughly human proportions. The celebrated sculptures have often been understood as ‘surrogates’ for the family and friends Bourgeois left behind. Widely exhibited, ‘Knife Couple’ has been a highlight of several Bourgeois retrospectives, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern in London, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.