Louise Bourgeois
American, born France (Paris, France, 1911 - 2010, New York City, New York)The Nest
The Nest is one of the earliest and most complex of the spider sculptures that Bourgeois created between 1994 and 1997. It blends sculpture with drawing through its ingenious use of legs as both sculptural objects and lines in space. Bourgeois repeatedly explored the spider, her self-selected totem figure, because of its power to intermingle two- and three-dimensional relationships. "What is a drawing?" asks Bourgeois. "It is a secretion, like a thread in a spider's web . . . . It is a knitting, a spiral, a spider web, a significant organization of space."
The spider first appeared in Bourgeois' drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, but it wasn't until sixty years later that she adopted it as the subject of her sculpture. She has mused, "Spider: the mother cuts the spider's web . . . . The friend (spider; why spider?). Because my best friend was my mother, and she was . . . (as) clever, patient and neat as a spider; she could also defend herself." The mother figure in this sculpture nurtures and protects her brood while exuding a threatening presence. The spider may also be a self-portrait of the artist in her intertwined roles as mother and daughter, and as creator of works that are both seductive and menacing.
Keywords
spiders, legs, stacks, mothers, children, protective, arachnids, intertwined
From June 3, 2013, through early 2016, SFMOMA's building on Third Street in San Francisco will be temporarily closed for expansion construction. Selected artworks in our collection are included in a range of off-site exhibitions during this period. We regret that the remainder of the collection will not be available for study during this time.
In the meantime, we invite you to explore a wide selection of our collection online. Please note that the information presented online is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify artwork details.
This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.
