PHILADELPHIA, PA.-.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents the exhibit of a Crouching Spider by Louise Bourgeois until April 30, 2007. Crouching Spider, a gigantic sculpture of bronze and stainless steel made up of a globular body and long, attenuated legs, is part of a celebrated series of spider sculptures that Louise Bourgeois produced beginning in the early 1990s. According to the artist herself, the spider is a reference to Bourgeois’s mother, who was a weaver and someone she described as being industrious and protecting. The artist also chose the spider for its role as a defender against other, more pernicious insects such as mosquitoes, which can carry deadly diseases.

Born in France in 1911, Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938 to pursue a career as an artist. Her sculpture and installations are marked by her singular use of not only bronze and marble, but also latex, wax, plaster, cement, and plastics. She is known for her biomorphic forms that frequently carry strong sexual implications. Her work, despite its pervasive autobiographical content, has universal appeal. An extraordinary work that is both threatening and playful, Crouching Spider reveals why Bourgeois is among the most provocative artists working today.

Louise Bourgeois finds inspiration for her works from her childhood: her adulterous father, who had an affair with her governess (who resided in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge it. She claims that she has been the "striking-image" of her father since birth. Louise Bourgeois is very effective in conveying feelings such as anger, betrayal and jealousy. Her earliest exhibition, in 1947, consisted of tunnel sculptures and wooden figures (such as winged figure 1948). Despite early success in that show (one of the works was purchased for the Museum of Modern Art), she was subsequently left alone by the art market during the fifties and sixties.

It was in the seventies, after the deaths of her husband and father, that she became one of the most successful artists living. In her sculpture, she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Some of her pieces consisted of erotic and sexual images, with a motif of "culums" (she named the round figures such because they reminded her of cumulus clouds). Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled maman, that have been made in the last dozen years. Today, she continues to work, having one of the longest careers that any artist has had.