Spider II, 1995

Louise Bourgeois made this spider sculpture, likely from bronze, with all its spindly legs and vulnerable underbelly, sometime during her long career. There’s a real push and pull here. The legs are stretched, elongated, and elegant. But they’re also uneven, imperfect, and a little bit wobbly, like a drawing that’s been erased and redrawn a million times. They speak of artmaking as a process, full of adjustments and revisions. I love the surface texture; it has this sort of mottled, almost skin-like quality. It’s rough, but also weirdly sensuous. And the way the light catches on those curves and angles, it gives the whole piece this feeling of being alive, like it could scuttle off at any moment. Bourgeois's spiders always remind me of the work of Eva Hesse, another artist who embraced vulnerability and imperfection in her sculptures. Both artists understood that art isn't about perfection, but about the messy, complicated reality of being human.