Assignment #3 Artistic Influence

  

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, French-American sculptor born in Paris in 1911 and living in the U.S. since 1938, is recognized as a leading artist of the 20th century, and her work is found in virtually every major public and private collection worldwide. Bourgeois’ sculpture is characterized by organic forms and the use of various materials including wood, stone, plaster, metal and latex, and it often deals with memories of her childhood and family. A complex and deftly woven body of her work involves spiders: huge spiders that inhabit and dominate great public spaces; or spiders, perhaps families of spiders, in intimate spaces. Bourgeois’ sculpture for Graphicstudio, Spider Home, is part of this poetic and immensely important work.

Based on Bourgeois’ steel art work Spider Home, the sculpture is in four components: two spider forms cast in bronze, and a welded web form of bronze wire with a cast bronze fly, all attached to a corner structure fabricated of wood.

Within the tradition of French bronze sculpture established by Rodin, Degas and others, Spider Home is published in an edition of six.

"The Spider is an ode to my mother.
She was a tapestry woman.
My mother was my best friend.
She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty,
subtle, indispensible, neat, and useful as a Spider."

- Louise Bourgeois 1996

The major new multiple Spider Home belongs to an ensemble of works by Bourgeois, described by Mieke Bal in Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing:

“...a large number of drawings, sculptures, and installations, each representing a huge spider, sometimes in combination with a small one, hovering over a page, a wall, a ceiling, a room....They are intensely figurative, hair-raisingly strong in their affect on the viewer... Yet through the narrativity that inheres to their figurativity and their appeal to mood, they invoke the home, which is where the memories of spiders belong and where little children spin their dreams out of spiders and their webs, webs that catch and enfold whatever comes their way.”

The Spider that Died in the Tower of London, Cornelia ParkerAbout the artist

Cornelia

Parker was born in

Cheshire, UK and is an

English sculptor and

installation artist. Parker

transforms familiar,

everyday objects in ways

to get the viewer to think

of them in a different way.

She does this by

suspending, enlarging,

exploding, crushing,

stretching objects, and

even through language

with her titles.

Parker is married and has

one daughter. She works in London.