Australia Joins the Louise Bourgeois Spider-verse

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010, France Follow +

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) will present a comprehensive exhibition of works by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois from 25 November 2023 to 28 April 2024.

Among the works in the show is the nine-metre-tall bronze Maman (1999). Constructed from bronze, steel, and marble, the sculpture is a tribute to the artist’s mother, a tapestry weaver who Bourgeois described as ‘deliberate, clever, patient, soothing’—traits she compared to a spider.

A similar work, the three-metre-tall Spider (1996), sold at Sotheby’s New York for U.S. $32.8 million in May. It is the second most expensive work by a female artist sold at auction, behind Georgia O’Keeffe‘s Jimson Weed/White Flower no. 1 (1932), which fetched $44.4 million in 2014.

Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand said, ‘we are proud to bring Maman, the largest spider sculpture ever made by Bourgeois, to Sydney for the very first time, and to be showcasing the extraordinary breadth of the artist’s practice, which includes fabric sculpture, works on paper, bronzes, works from her series of Cells, mechanised sculpture, and more.’

The exhibition will be held in the Gallery’s new North Building, expanding into the South Building forecourt and the Tank, previously a World War II fuel bunker.

Exhibition curator Justin Paton said, ‘Bourgeois is an artist of extremes, of opposed yet intertwined impulses—obsessed with the complicated and contradictory truth of our feelings towards ourselves and others.’

‘Her work maintained—and still delivers—a charge of intimacy, urgency and piercing peculiarity,’ he continued. ‘Far from being a distant and admirable monument, Bourgeois comes to us as a contemporary—someone working through unfinished business about womanhood and selfhood today.’

Works by Bourgeois will be augmented by contributions from artist Jenny Holzer and composer Kali Malone.

Filmmaker Jane Campion and author Chris Kraus have provided material for an exhibition publication. —[O]

Main image: Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999). Exhibition view: To Unravel a Torment, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (3 December 2020–20 June 2021). Courtesy The Easton Foundation. Photo: Filipe Braga.