John Hurrell – 19 October, 2025

As a ‘taster’—a small but remarkable selection of 47 cast, fired, painted, printed and drawn works from this legendary artist, but an absolute treat—this focused presentation covers most of the subject-matter for which Bourgeois (1911-2010) is justly adored. These distinctive images include web-dwelling spiders, giant eyes, austere architecture, circular mirrors, bared claws, shriveled willies, pussies, standing pregnant women, vertical totems, winding staircases, enclosing cages, cells, egg clusters, arched torsos, stretched limbs and mysterious pyramids.

Overtly emotional and deeply psychological, yet at times highly abstracted, these strange elongated forms seem derived from distant memory, and are made with padded soft cotton fabric as much as say cast bronze. Bourgeois came from a family of tapestry repairers and so an interest in fabric developed in the last third of her life.

For Auckland audiences, these are large sculptures and drawings, but not massive, such as those the Tate has exhibited. They take up two of the Art Gallery bays though are not crammed. There is plenty of room because many images are framed and on the walls. Surprisingly intimate, they reveal Bourgeois started off as a very gifted painter. She ended up transforming sculpture making.

Looking at these fascinatingly, but sometimes creepy, bronze items (borrowed from an anonymous European collection) helps us understand why this influential artist is the inscrutable, but mischievous, energetic pioneering legend she became—an inventive creator of separated body parts, menacing arachnid shapes, fecund biological forms, ancient primal symbols, and imposing vertical totems. All blended with a raw organic physicality and love of surface texture and dynamic form. When you look at these bodily images, they fire up your imagination and get under your skin, usually before you can stand back and analyse the conceptual and symbolic overtones of what is depicted.

In Bourgeois’s own commentary on the origins of her practice, she made much of her distress (a ‘betrayal’) at her father’s affair with her English governess, for although the spider in its lair ostensibly is a very positive symbol because of its connection with the crafts of weaving and sewing, there is also the opposite sense of toxicity: spider as femme fatale or home breaker. A double layer containing contradictions.

This show is unmissable as an introduction to this extraordinary artist. If you Google her you can find the MoMA Chief Curator at MoMA, Emerita Deborah Wye, speaking eloquently about Bourgeois online. That is worth exploring, even though it has mostly different (though related) works from In Private View.

John Hurrell

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