Curator, Deborah Wye: Welcome to Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait. The main part of the exhibition, is on the third floor.
This selection of prints and sculpture, carries on a theme in the exhibition, exploring Bourgeois’s relationship to nature. All the prints here are quite abstract, but they also suggest elements of the natural world—flowers, twisting vines, seeds, hanging fruit.
Spiders are also creatures of nature, and Bourgeois called the spider her friend, when it caught mosquitoes in summer. But she also saw her spiders, on a symbolic level, as representing her mother. The way the spider spins a web, was like her mother restoring tapestries, which was her trade.
Louise Bourgeois: The spider is my mother, believe it or not. That is to say, the person who is totally reliable, totally intellectual, totally logical, with no burst of passion. I really don’t appreciate the passion. It is my mother, not only that, but I try to imitate her, I try to be as smart as she used to be.