Guggenheim Museum Bilbao The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao collection was conceived to complement that of the Guggenheim Foundation, so that together they would provide an overview of the arts in the 20th and 21st centuries. [More] Shortcut Full search								<Previous work Next work> Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999 (cast 2001). Bronze, stainless steel and marble, 352 3/8 x 386179 1/8 x 456 11/16 inches. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. GBM2001.1. © Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
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 (b. Paris, 1911). Through a vast oeuvre spanning over 60 years, Bourgeois has plumbed the depths of human emotion further and more passionately than perhaps any other artist of our 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: 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