Louise Bourgeois’s soaring spider sculpture Maman (1999) will return to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall next spring in honour of the gallery’s 25th-anniversary celebration. Standing ten metres high, the monolithic piece will greet visitors just as it did when Tate Modern opened its doors in 2000.
The return of Maman is more than a nostalgic nod to Tate’s beginnings; it will be the centrepiece for a newly launched collection trail celebrating both recent acquisitions and works from the gallery’s history. Launching during Tate Modern’s anniversary weekend on 9–12 May, the trail promises to bring moments from the past together with fresh perspectives, reflecting the evolution of its collection over a quarter of a century.
Bourgeois’s Maman is a haunting yet tender ode to motherhood that has long been a touchstone in contemporary art. Delicate and powerful, this spindly-legged creature supports its sac of marble eggs. It is as compelling now as it was in 2000 when presiding over the visitors who thronged the newly opened Bankside Power Station. In 2023 alone, 4.7 million people came to the Tate Modern, cementing its position as a cultural hub on the world scene.
Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: A Monument to Memory and Maternal Power
Few works in modern art have the monumental presence of Maman, Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture. More than 30 feet tall, it’s precarious and ominous, poised between tenderness and terror. When she created it in 1999, the spider would become her best-known artwork as part of her series Cells. A condensation of her memories affects her obsessions.
The spider appeared in Bourgeois’s work in the 1940s in drawings and small sculptures. But it wasn’t until Maman- a title at once affectionate and unnerving- that the arachnid began to take colossal form. To Bourgeois, the spider suggested her mother, Joséphine, a weaver who repaired tapestries in the family’s Paris workshop. “The spider is a homage to my mother,” Bourgeois once said. “She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, and indispensable.”
But Bourgeois’s spiders are not only guardians of the home. They also represent the ambivalence of maternal love: protective and predatory, nurturing and fearsome. Maman converts these themes into a physical and psychic encounter on this monumental scale. As visitors walk beneath its towering legs, they are made to feel vulnerable, dwarfed by the creature’s sheer size, while awed by its strength and delicate construction.
Subsequent Spiders in bronze, steel, and marble iterations have since appeared in cities from Paris to Tokyo to Ottawa, their looming silhouettes casting shadows on public squares and museum forecourts. In each setting, Bourgeois’s spider remains deeply personal and profoundly universal.
Ultimately, Maman transcends its form, turning the maternal figure into a mythic and human force. As much of Bourgeois’s work does, it reminds us that art can hold opposing truths—a balance of vulnerability and strength, fear and comfort.
Louise Bourgeois, Maman, Tate Modern 2000 Photo Tate Photography
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