Louise Bourgeois, Ode à Ma Mère (1995), 1995

About the Artwork

Louise Bourgeois’ Ode à Ma Mère (1995) is a deeply personal portfolio of nine drypoint engravings exploring the artist’s enduring themes of motherhood, memory, family and the spider. The complete set brings together nine works accompanied by printed text by Bourgeois, presented in the original linen portfolio.

The title Ode à Ma Mère, translated as “Ode to My Mother”, reflects Bourgeois’ lifelong fascination with her mother, Joséphine, and the complex emotional relationships that shaped her artistic practice. Across the nine prints, recurring images of spiders, spirals and organic forms evoke protection, creativity, vulnerability and the maternal figure.

The spider became one of Bourgeois’ most recognisable motifs, and its significance is particularly poignant in relation to Ode à Ma Mère. Bourgeois associated the spider with her mother, who worked as a tapestry restorer and whom the artist remembered as intelligent, patient and protective. The spider could therefore represent both the strength and fragility of motherhood, while also recalling the act of weaving and repairing.

Created in 1995, Ode à Ma Mère demonstrates Bourgeois’ sophisticated approach to printmaking late in her career. The intimate scale and tactile qualities of drypoint allow the imagery to retain a sense of immediacy and vulnerability, while the repetition across the nine works creates a visual and conceptual dialogue between the individual plates.

This complete Louise Bourgeois Ode à Ma Mère portfolio comprises nine prints, each measuring approximately 31 × 31 cm, housed in the original linen portfolio. The works are initialled and numbered, with the colophon signed and numbered. The edition comprises the book edition of 90 initialled copies, alongside 35 hors commerce sets.

About the Ode à Ma Mère Series

Ode à Ma Mère is one of Louise Bourgeois’ most intimate print portfolios, bringing together several of the themes that recur throughout her work: motherhood, family, memory, the body and the spider.

The spider holds a particularly important place within Bourgeois’ visual language. Rather than functioning simply as an image of fear or unease, her spiders frequently embody maternal protection and creativity. Bourgeois famously connected the spider to her mother, whose work as a tapestry restorer gave the artist an early association between spiders, weaving, repair and maternal care.

The nine works in Ode à Ma Mère develop this symbolism through repeated forms and variations. Some plates feature recognisable spider imagery, while others incorporate spirals and more abstract organic forms. The repetition is characteristic of Bourgeois’ practice, allowing an image or idea to be revisited from different emotional and psychological perspectives.

Printmaking was an important part of Bourgeois’ artistic career from its earliest stages. She began making prints in the late 1930s after moving from Paris to New York, and throughout her career she repeatedly returned to the medium as a way of exploring and reworking personal imagery. Her printmaking practice encompassed techniques including drypoint, engraving, etching and lithography, often allowing her to experiment with states and variations of an image.

The Ode à Ma Mère portfolio was published in Paris by Les Éditions du Solstice in 1995. The complete portfolio comprises nine compositions, with MoMA recording nine drypoints, including works incorporating monoprinting, embossing and roulette, as well as selective wiping. Each sheet measures approximately 30 × 30 cm.

Owning the complete set is particularly significant because the works are intended to be understood together. Rather than presenting a single isolated image, Ode à Ma Mère offers an extended meditation on motherhood and memory, with the recurring spider and organic forms connecting the nine individual compositions into a unified body of work.

About Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was one of the most influential artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Born in Paris, she moved to New York in 1938 and developed an extraordinarily personal artistic language encompassing sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation.

Bourgeois’ work is renowned for its exploration of memory, childhood, family relationships, sexuality, motherhood and the unconscious. Rather than separating her personal experiences from her art, she used them as a source of imagery and psychological investigation, transforming deeply personal memories into works with universal emotional resonance.

Among her most recognisable motifs is the spider. Bourgeois began making spider sculptures in the 1990s, culminating in monumental works such as Maman, but the motif appeared throughout her drawings and prints as well. For Bourgeois, the spider was closely connected to her mother and could embody qualities of intelligence, protection, patience and industriousness. This association makes the spider imagery in Ode à Ma Mère particularly significant.

Printmaking remained an important thread throughout Bourgeois’ career. Her early experiences with printmaking began in New York in the late 1930s, including work at Stanley William Hayter’s influential Atelier 17. She later returned to printmaking repeatedly, using its capacity for variation and repetition to revisit imagery and ideas across different states and compositions.

Today, Louise Bourgeois is recognised as a pivotal figure in modern and contemporary art, with her work held in major international museum collections. Ode à Ma Mère belongs to an important period in her mature practice, when the spider and themes of motherhood had become central to her artistic vocabulary.

For collectors, the Louise Bourgeois Ode à Ma Mère complete set offers an especially compelling opportunity to acquire a coherent body of work by one of the most important artists of the post-war period. Its combination of personal subject matter, distinctive printmaking and limited-edition rarity makes it a significant example of Bourgeois’ graphic work.

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