Louise Bourgeois Spider 1997 © Louise Bourgeois Steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold and bone 4450 x 6660 x 5180 mm

Maman first made an appearance as part of Bourgeois’s inaugural commission for The Unilever Series for Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall in 2000. A bronze version of Maman is currently on display outside Tate Modern, as part of the current exhibition. An exhibition, which unsurprisingly has proved to be one of the most popular exhibitions of sculpture at Tate. Maman 1999 is a gift of the artist and an anonymous benefactor.

Bourgeois, now in her ninety-sixth year, is regarded as one of the most important artists working today. She has always explored her ideas in an extraordinary variety of media, which the current exhibition emphasizes brilliantly. Over the course of seven decades - all of which the exhibition includes work from – Bourgeois has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism and her work has ranged in scale from small obsessively-worked objects to large installations such as the Cells of the 1980s and 1990s.

She is, however, perhaps best-known for her Spiders which as with all her work is deeply autobiographical in its references. Bourgeois has said, “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."