Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?
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