This 1990 file photo released by the Guggenheim Museum shows artist Louis Bourgeois alongside her sculpture, “Eye to Eye, 1970.” Bourgeois died Monday at 98.

New York ? Artist Louise Bourgeois, whose sculptures exploring women’s deepest feelings on birth, sexuality and death were highly influential on younger artists, died Monday, her studio’s managing director said. She was 98.

Bourgeois had continued creating artwork before suffering a heart attack Saturday night, said the studio director, Wendy Williams. The artist died at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, where she lived.

Working in a wide variety of materials, she tackled themes relating to male and female bodies and emotions of anger, betrayal, even murder. Her work reflected influences of surrealism, primitivism and the early modernist sculptors such as Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi.

“I really want to worry people, to bother people,” she told The Washington Post in 1984. “They say they are bothered by the double genitalia in my new work. Well, I have been bothered by it my whole life.”

Bourgeois’ work was almost unknown to the wider art world until she was 70, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented a solo show of her career in 1982.

“This is not a show that is easy to digest,” New York Times critic Grace Glueck wrote. “The reward is an intense encounter with an artist who explores her psyche at considerable risk.”

In his book “American Visions,” Time art critic Robert Hughes called her “the mother of American feminist identity art. … Bourgeois’s influence on young artists has been enormous.”

He noted the key difference in her use of sexual imagery: She explores “femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar male conventions of looking at it from the outside, from the eyeline of another gender. … Surrealist fascination with the female body becomes, so to speak, turned inside out.”