NARRATOR:  

Curator Alison Gass.  

ALISON GASS: 

Louise Bourgeois said that the act of drawing is about weaving a line or weaving a web in space. And if you think of what a spider web looks like, in fact, it really is kind of a two-dimensional drawing that exists in space.  

NARRATOR: 

French-born artist Louise Bourgeois’s career spans more than seven decades. Her sculpture takes many forms but is unified by powerful psychological investigation and a surrealist sensibility. 

GASS:  

The spider, in particular, is an image that has been part of her practice since the 1940s, and it entered primarily through drawing. And in fact, this large sculpture begins to feel, as well, like a drawing in space. It’s this familiar object, a spider, but it’s blown up way beyond the scale of anything that we can recognize or feel comfortable with. And it’s a really amazing image of maternal being, if you think about it, this unsettling, strange giant spider is not at all what we think of as the traditional icons of maternity in the art world, traditional icons of something that’s gentle and supporting and safe. While this form may appear really menacing to us from the outside, from the perspective of the baby spider at the bottom of this nest, it feels like this very safe space, this very safe experience of being protected from their outside world.