Louise Bourgeois Maman (Ama)-info

Like a creature escaped from a dream, or a larger-than-life embodiment of a secret childhood fear, the

giant spider Maman (1999) casts a powerful physical and psychological shadow. Over 30 feet high, the

mammoth sculpture is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the long career of Louse Bourgeois.

Over a vast oeuvre spanning more than sixty years, Bourgeois plumbed the depths of human emotion

further and more passionately than perhaps any other artist of her time. In its evocation of the psyche,

her work is both universal and deeply personal, with frequent, explicit reference to painful childhood

memories of an unfaithful father and a loving but complicit mother. Bourgeois first gained notice in the

1940s with her Surrealist-inspired Personnages (1945–55): thin, vertical forms in wood or stone that

evoke the human body. Installed in clusters, suggesting a small crowd or perhaps a family, the

Personnages were meant to symbolize figures from the artist's past. Maman, in fact, is associated with

the artist's own mother. The spider, who protects her precious eggs in a steel cage-like body, provokes

awe and fear, but her massive height, improbably balanced on slender legs, conveys an almost poignant

vulnerability. Meghan Dailey