A monumental Spider by Louise Bourgeois will go to auction at Sotheby's. Estimated at $30-40 million

On May 18, one of French sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ most famous works will go up for auction in New York at Sotheby ’s: the monumental Spider from 1996. Estimated at between $30 million and $40 million, it is one of forty-two known monumental spiders in the artist’s oeuvre, over a third of which are now in museum collections. This Spider comes from Fundação Itaú, Brazil, having been in the prestigious collection of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art for more than twenty-five years. The sculpture was also among the stars of the twenty-third Bienal de São Paulo in 1996. With an extraordinary and unparalleled exhibition history, Spider has remained on permanent display at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art for over twenty years and has been widely loaned and exhibited in prestigious institutions in South America over the past quarter century.

Bourgeois’ Spiders are among the most iconic sculptures of the 20th century. At the heart of his work is the confrontation of his own emotionality and psyche translated into sculptural form. In homage to his upbringing, Bourgeois imbues the delicate curves and needle-like limbs of his spiders with memories of his mother, a tapestry weaver. The Spider thus represents a tribute to the mother figure, as Bourgeois associates motherhood with weaving, an art shared with his own mother Joséphine. The death of her mother in 1932 was a trauma that transformed Bourgeois’ entire artistic practice, as she sought to overcome that loss through her sculptural creations.

All proceeds will go to the artistic-cultural initiatives of Fundação Itaú.

Image: Louise Bourgeois, Spider. Photo by Edouard Fraipont

A monumental Spider by Louise Bourgeois will go to auction at Sotheby's. Estimated at $30-40 million

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