Spiral woman

During her long career Louise Bourgeois created highly personal art that drew on her childhood memories of her fraught relationship with her mother, her father and his lover, who was also her governess. Influenced by French Surrealism, Bourgeois developed an idiosyncratic style to address complex psychological states, with her art often exploring her competing roles of daughter, mother, wife and artist.

This engraving Spiral woman belongs to the portfolio La Réparation (Reparation). The iconography of the spiral woman emerged from Bourgeois’s sculpture in the 1950s and she returned to it in drawings, prints and sculptures over subsequent decades. Noting that the spiral was a symbol of control and freedom, Bourgeois commented: ‘It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and wring them … Later I would dream of my father’s mistress. I would do it in my dreams by wringing her neck'.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs