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Louise Bourgeois Spider, 1994
Throughout the 1940s and 50s Louise Bourgeois played an increasingly active part in the New York art world, and in 1966 she took part in the renowned Eccentric Abstraction alongside younger artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. By the 1970s, with works like Confrontation (1978), she had become a singular point of reference in feminist art. Following her MoMA retrospective in 1982, her work took on a new life of sculptural installations, series of drawings and outstanding new works like the Spider series, which established her firmly as one of the major artists of the final years of the 20th Century. This was a work that looked back at her own past, and enabled her, as she explained to Bill Beckley, “to re-experience fear, to give it a physicality, so that I am able to hack away at it. I am saying in my sculpture today what I could not make out in the past”. When Bourgeois first exhibited Spider at New York’s Brooklyn Museum in spring 1994, she showed it in a reduced space, bringing to the fore the sense of looming menace that a large sculpture can have. The work, purchased shortly afterwards by the Reina Sofía Museum, is one of the first pieces in a series that the artist would continue to work on until the end of the decade. Bourgeois carried on a theme that had appeared in her drawings in the 1940s, with somewhat humanised geometrical forms, which coin-cided temporally with the drawings and paintings of the Femme-maison series, whose concept of architecture and female shelter is actually not far from the great sculpture of 1994. The meaning of Spider is at least two-sided: one side alludes to the concept of protection and defence against outside threats typical of any animal. The other is the incarnation of the idea of the mother, which Bourgeois associates with the concepts of patience, cleanliness, reason and the adjective ‘indispensable’, which is actually the title of a drawing from 1994 and another sculpture in the series.
This connection was made explicit in the gigantic spider standing over nine metres tall, which she called Maman; a work from 1999 which held beneath its abdomen a sac of eggs, and whose presence was undeniably menacing. The Museum’s work does not only contain these feminine details, but also contains in the work biographical images such as an actual needle, a reference to the profession and passion of the artist’s mother, in her work as a tapestry restorer. This detail and its entire structure highlight the fragility of the piece, however structured and menacing it is, with all its sharp angularity. This is a sculpture that also alludes to the concept of the thread “the thread of life, a spider’s thread cut by the mother”, as the artist herself puts it.
Bibliography: Bernadac, Marie-Laure y Storsve, Jonas (ed). Louise Bourgeois. Tate Publishing, 2007 (English version) and Centre Pompidou, París 2008 (French version) [cat. exp.] Bal, Mieke Louise Bourgeois,’ Spider, The Architecture of Artwriting, University of Chicago Press, 2001 [Spanish version: Una casa para el sueño de la razón [Ensayo sobre Louse Bourgeois], Cendeac, Murcia, 2006] Caux, Jacqueline. Tissée, tendue au fil des tours, la toile de Lousise Bourgeois. Seuil, 2003 Bourgeois, Louise. Louise Bourgeois. Destruction of the Father-Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997, Violette ed. Londres 2000, [Destrucción del padre/reconstrucción del padre, 1923-1997, Ed. Síntesis, Madrid, 2002]. Gorovoy, Jerry, Tilkin, Danielle, Helfenstein, Joseph, y otros. Louise Bourgeois Memoria y arquitectura, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1999.