A fascinating sight has appeared on the forecourt of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ original South Building, and heads are turning. A monumental spider, which stands more than nine metres high and ten metres wide, made of bronze, steel and marble, is the unmissable first encounter gallery visitors will have with the work of trailblazing French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. The world-famous and seminal arachnidian sculpture, ‘Maman’ (1999), is an ode to the artist’s mother, who she described as “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing… and [as] useful as a spider”.
The colossal sculpture is in Australia for the first time ever as part of the largest and most comprehensive display of the artist’s work ever seen in the Asia Pacific – Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? – which opens on Saturday, November 25, as part of the 2023 Sydney International Art Series (closing on April 28, 2024).
Her work maintained – and still delivers – a charge of intimacy, urgency and piercing peculiarity...
The exhibition spreads across a considerably large footprint, weaving through the Art Gallery campus with the eerily beautiful force of a wave of spiders wrapping the institution in a silken, cobwebbed nest. This is also the first major solo exhibition to be staged in the Art Gallery’s world-class modern North Building, the centrepiece of the Sydney Modern expansion, almost one year since it opened to the public in December 2022.
Moving from the South Building’s forecourt to the white rooms of ‘Day’ on lower level 2 of the North Building, then to the darkened terrain of ‘Night’ downstairs in The Tank (a former Second World War fuel bunker), viewers will encounter more than 120 of Bourgeois’ works. Many among them have never been seen before in Australia, including ‘The Destruction of the Father’ (1974) and one of the largest works to be presented in the Tank, ‘Crouching Spider’ (2003).
Born in Paris in 1911 and living and working in New York until her death in 2010, Bourgeois is renowned for her fearless exploration of human relationships across a relentlessly inventive seven-decade career. This ambitious exhibition in Sydney reveals the extraordinary reach and intensity of Bourgeois’s art, from her haunting ‘Personage’ sculptures of the 1940s to her tough yet tender textile works of the 1990s and 2000s. It also reveals, as never before, the psychological tensions that powered her search, through a dramatic presentation in two contrasting exhibition spaces.
“Visitors are invited to join us on an emotional journey through the highs and lows, intensities and polarities, memories and fantasies of the artist,” explains exhibition curator and AGNSW’s head curator of international art, Justin Paton.
“Bourgeois is an artist of extremes, of opposed yet intertwined impulses – obsessed with the complicated and contradictory truth of our feelings towards ourselves and others. Her work maintained – and still delivers – a charge of intimacy, urgency and piercing peculiarity. Far from being a distant and admirable monument, Bourgeois comes to us as a contemporary – someone working through unfinished business about womanhood and selfhood today.”
The exhibition was birthed from a close collaboration with The Easton Foundation, New York, which administers Bourgeois’s legacy. It all began with a conversation in 2016 when AGNSW acquired Bourgeois’s ‘Arched Figure’ (1993).
Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? is showing alongside the Art Gallery’s Kandinsky exhibition, which is also part of the Sydney International Art Series. The third piece of the puzzle arrives at the Museum of Contemporary Art from December 8, which is hosting the largest presentation of Tacita Dean’s work ever seen in the Southern Hemisphere.
Exhibition tickets are on sale over here starting at $35 for adults, with discounts and family passes also availiable. You can save by purchasing tickets in a bundle for Art Gallery’s concurrent 2023-24 Sydney International Art Series Kandinsky exhibition; or an Art Pass also gets you access to the MCA's Sydney International Art Series exhibition featuring Tacita Dean.