Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois, a french-American artist, was primarily a sculpture artist, who created works that explored topics such as memory, sex, and trauma. Her large portfolio of work includes artworks made through printmaking, painting, and most commonly, sculpture. With an oeuvre spanning more than sixty years, Bourgeois explored the depths of human emotion more deeply and passionately than perhaps any other artist of the era. One of her most well-known sculptures, which upon succession then turned into a series, was that of the Spider, made in 1994.
Maman is inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ own mother. Her mother’s appearance as a spider, who protects her eggs in steel cages, is both beautiful and terrifying, yet also poignant due to her improbably built extended legs. This depiction stems from the home environment that Bourgeois lived in. Her teacher, who was also her father’s mistress, lived with Louise and her family, her mother living complacently with the dynamic.
Bourgeois once explained that she chose the spider as a subject because its traits reminded her of her mother. “She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider,” the artist said. Made using bronze and plaster, this artwork exemplifies an assemblage that is astounding. She had previously explored arachnid forms in two ink and charcoal drawings from 1947, but this sculptural series would take those ideas to a monumental scale.
In the final decade of her life, before she passed in 2010, Louise Bourgeois created multiple renditions of this work which were placed in many locations around the world. This includes places such as Switzerland, the USA in; Arkansas, Iowa, and Kansas City, and California, Japan in Tokyo, South Korea in Samsung Museum of Art, Spain in the Guggenheim, Russia in Saint Petersburg Hermitage Museum, and finally, London in the Tate Modern.
A sculpture 30 feet high, and the most ambitious work Bourgeois attempted. This artwork exhibited the momentous scale that you can incorporate into your work and the impact that these choices make. Through the consideration of scale, Louise Bourgeous has created nearly a dozen sculptures that leave viewers in awe of the sheer size. In my work with photoshop and consideration of scale, I am interested in creating a sculpture which I can then, using photoshop, expand the scale to create an intervention on a big scale.
Web Links
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bourgeois-louise/life-and-legacy/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bourgeois-louise/artworks/
https://publicdelivery.org/louise-bourgeois-spider-maman/