Maman (Ama) spider like sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

A visit to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art in Bilbao (Biscay), Spain. It is one of several museums affiliated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. It was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, with an exhibition of 250 contemporary works of art. It is one of the largest museums in Spain.

The building, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, was built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city to the Cantabrian Sea. A work of contemporary architecture, it has been hailed as a "signal moment in the architectural culture", because it represents "one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something", according to architectural critic Paul Goldberger. The museum was the building most frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey among architecture experts.

The Maman de Louise Bourgeois spider like sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois
Maman (Ama)

Like a creature escaped from a dream, or a larger-than-life embodiment of a secret childhood fear, the giant spider Maman (1999) casts a powerful physical and psychological shadow. Over 30 feet high, the mammoth sculpture is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the long career of Louse Bourgeois. Over a vast oeuvre spanning more than sixty years, Bourgeois plumbed the depths of human emotion further and more passionately than perhaps any other artist of her time. In its evocation of the psyche, her work is both universal and deeply personal, with frequent, explicit reference to painful childhood memories of an unfaithful father and a loving but complicit mother. Bourgeois first gained notice in the 1940s with her Surrealist-inspired Personnages (1945–55): thin, vertical forms in wood or stone that evoke the human body. Installed in clusters, suggesting a small crowd or perhaps a family, the Personnages were meant to symbolize figures from the artist’s past. Maman, in fact, is associated with the artist’s own mother. The spider, who protects her precious eggs in a steel cage-like body, provokes awe and fear, but her massive height, improbably balanced on slender legs, conveys an almost poignant vulnerability.

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Taken in: Spain / Basque Country / Bilbao / Bilbao (show map)

Taken on: June 26, 2024

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Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Bilbao

Basque

Biscay

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Frank Gehry

Nervion River

Guggenheim Bilbao

Abando

Basque Country

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Ingelesen Landako Kaia

Mazarredo Zumarkalea

Jose Maria Aguirre Larraona

Unibertsitate Etorb

Campo de Volantín

Bizkaia

Abandoibarra

sculpture

Maman de Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Maman (Ama)

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Sets appears in: • Guggenheim Museum Bilbao • Bilbao

Groups appears in: • Sculpture

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Aperture:	f/6.3
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