Louise Bourgeois’ second solo show in Hong Kong explores motherhood, womanhood and the artist's posthumous legacy

Just as the spider serves as a metaphor for the mother figure, other works are heavily influenced by Bourgeois’s upbringing and complex relationship with her parents. Bourgeois was born in 1911 to a family that ran a tapestry restoration workshop. Towards her domineering father, who had an affair with her governess and was often absent from home, even on the day his mother died, she had ambivalent feelings of anger and loss. It took four decades to make peace with his behaviour; some the 1940s and Eighties explored her ambivalence, such as The Destruction of the Father, a 1974 installation that stages an imaginary act of revenge against a patriarchal father figure. In this period, she also captured her homesickness in her art—she had moved from Paris to New York—and explored themes of motherhood and female identity at a time when the art industry was largely celebrating male artists. This exploration did not, however, come with political intentions.

“Louise was a feminist in her life but she was not a feminist in her work. She always resisted being labelled as a feminist artist, because she felt that feminist art was almost like political art that addresses a subject. The concerns that she was most interested in, like the fear of abandonment, the need for connection, miscommunication and anxiety, are universal experiences. This isn’t a male or a female condition. It’s a human condition,” says Larratt-Smith. “She believed that art was her form of psychoanalysis. It was a way of achieving a temporary discharge of unwelcome impulses or blocked desires. She didn’t think art was a cure but something that allows you to continue to exist and live.”

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In the 1990s, Bourgeois palpably shifted towards focusing on the image of the mother, partly due to her age. “She was frailer and more dependent on other people. She felt, in a way, that she was in need of a mother to take care of her,” says Larratt-Smith. This feeling reminded her of her own mother, whom she fondly remembered as her protective “best friend”. As a young woman, Bourgeois took care of her mother when she contracted Spanish flu until she died in 1932, an event that devastated Bourgeois, who was then 20.

“Louise had been a mother to her own mother. So she invoked her mother [through her art], in a way, to come back and repay the debt of looking after her.” The spider was chosen because her mother, as she famously described her in 1995, was “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as an araignée [spider]”. Bourgeois’s spider sculptures range in materials and size, from a 10cm brooch to monumental outdoor installations, to express her evolving emotional and psychological states. While Spider examines, with humour, the state of motherhood as a burden, others, such as Maman (“mum” in French), allude to the intimidating yet protective and nurturing nature of a spider—and her mother’s role as a weaver who repaired damaged tapestries in her father’s workshop. “Louise saw this continuity between the mother’s body, which is a container for the child, and the enormous architecture that provides shelter,” says Larratt-Smith.

At the same time, the spider is also a representation of herself. “Just as the spider spins its web out of its own body, Louise felt that her sculpture was coming directly out of her own body,” he says, “so she would often use the spider as a symbol of her own mother, herself and her identification with the mother.”

Gender, womanhood and maternity are common subjects in Bourgeois’s practice. The Hong Kong show will also feature her 1991 sculpture Mamelles (“teats” in French). This bronze fountain is made up of an elongated accumulation of breast forms, with five of the nipples pouring water into a basin. “It’s very beautiful. It’s Louise’s idea of the good mother who provides milk for her child,” explains Larratt-Smith. The number five for Bourgeois signified the family because she was born into a family of five in France and then later had a family of five in New York with her husband Robert Goldwater.

Mamelles has been cast in a range of different materials: a rubber version currently belongs to The Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, while a marble rendition is stored in a Norwegian collection and is on long-term loan to Norway’s Kistefos Museum. “This is the first time that the bronze fountain is being shown,” Larratt-Smith says. “It was very important to Louise to think about her work in relationship to architecture. This bronze one hadn’t been shown anywhere because the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself—my team and I decided to show it [in Hong Kong]. We think it will have a very nice effect in the gallery, because it’s positioned in one of the back rooms, so you will hear the water as you get close to it. It’s almost transforming a gallery into a garden or grotto.”

As important as site-specificity was to Bourgeois, she didn’t leave behind instructions after her death in 2010 as to where her sculptures are to be displayed. “Louise liked her spiders to be shown in more claustrophobic settings so it almost feels like it’s bursting against the confinement. That was her preference. I also work very closely with Louise’s long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy, who knows better than anyone what Louise would have wanted,” he says. “But those aren’t her doctrines, and I think the resilience and versatility of her pieces is evident in the fact that they stand up to different contexts.”

At The Easton Foundation, a non-profit organisation that preserves Bourgeois’s scholarship and art, Larratt-Smith and his team continue to promote her legacy. This year, her works will also be shown in Fubon Art Museum, the March exhibition marking her first show in Taiwan; Ho-Am Art Museum in South Korea in August; and then at Hauser & Wirth in New York in the autumn.

“There’s something in how she uses language and forms that will stand the test of time,” the curator says, adding that creatives outside the visual art domain, such as filmmakers Jane Campion and Pedro Almodóvar and fashion designer Simone Rocha, have referenced Bourgeois in their works or named her as an inspiration. “It’s like Louise had, in a strange way, crossed over [time and genre]. She worked with the great themes of classical art: love, death, beauty and the need for togetherness and family. She was touching on things that still concern all of us in our daily lives. This is part of her extraordinary power.”

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