NEW YORK, NY.- On November 10th, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale promises to be a landmark occasion for the art market when Christie’s will offer Spider, one of Louise Bourgeois’s most enduring and iconic motifs and the largest work by the artist ever offered at auction. Estimated between $25 million to $35 million, the mammoth bronze arachnid is expected to surpass the artist’s current record of $10.7 million, established in 2011 by Christie’s New York for a different edition of Spider, and is set to make history for the sale of a sculpture by a female artist.

Acquired in 1997 by the present owner, this exceptional Spider has been featured prominently in every major Bourgeois retrospective, including The Prada Foundation, Milan; the Foundation Belem and Malmo Konsthall, Lisbon; the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Kyungki-Do, Korea; the Akademie Der Bildenden Kunste Wien and Kunstraum Innsbruck, Vienna; Rockefeller Center, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the City Art Museum, Helsinki Stockholm; the Museet for Samtidskunst and Humlebæk, Oslo; the Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana; the Playhouse Square’s Star Plaza, Cleveland; the Akademie der Künste, Berlin-Brandenburg; the Wilfredo Lam Center, Havana; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, and the Museo Picasso, Málaga.

With its combination of irregular, hand-worked surfaces and smooth, highly finished elements, the spider form is a complex mix of menace and emotion. Stretching upward over ten feet, Spider’s exaggerated legs recall the arches of so many Gothic cathedrals. Its yarn-like body suspended in air, Spider’s form becomes an airy mass—creating a space of both asylum and inquisition. A source of extreme fear for some, the artist’s giant spider cannot help but conjure up cult American science fiction movies of the late 1950s, exploiting the notion of arachnophobia by positing the end of the Earth through the diabolical acts of an eight-legged monster. For Bourgeois however, the spider takes on a more personal role, acting as the embodiment of her own turbulent autobiography.

“It is an honor to present at auction this masterwork by one of the most significant and influential artists of our time. Spider is a tour de force through which Bourgeois masterfully brings us into her highly personal, symbolic and powerful domain.” declared Jonathan Laib, Senior Specialist Post-War and Contemporary Art.

Conceived in 1996 and executed in 1997, Spider is third in an edition of six brilliantly rendered sculptures by Bourgeois, based upon a motif that she initially referenced in a small ink and charcoal drawing in 1947. In the second half of the 1990s, the spider became a dominant preoccupation for the artist, who created colossal versions such as Maman, 1999, which was exhibited to great acclaim at Tate Modern, London, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Three spiders of the six existing reside permanently in institutions in the US, Brazil and Korea.

Bourgeois has spoken of the spider as evoking her mother Josephine, who repaired tapestries in the textile restoration workshop that Bourgeois’s father ran in Paris.

Louise Bourgeois wrote: “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother."

Spider may also be said to draw on the Greek legend of Arachne, the mortal weaver who challenged the goddess Athena and was condemned to become a spider, as well as the reputation of the black widow who eats her partner immediately after mating. These sources—personal, mythological and folkloric—combine to give a sense of the bittersweet fate of being a woman, a wife and a mother. Bourgeois’s choice to use the traditionally male-dominated domain of monumental sculpture to articulate her childhood feelings intensifies the effect and represents a repudiation of the power of her volatile father.

Born in Paris, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), lived in a building on the rue de Seine that also housed the Galerie Gradiva, a Surrealist exhibition space. During the Second World War, she moved to New York and spent time with members of the exiled Surrealist circle, including André Breton, André Masson and Joan Miró.