Mother!

Louise Bourgeois, an artist long fascinated with the unsettling nature of maternity, spent the final decade of her life exploring new forms she etched onto rags, handkerchiefs, and other household fabrics. The key piece, Self-Portrait (2009), in Once There Was a Mother at Hauser & Wirth comprises a bedsheet stitched with a twenty-four-hour clock, each hour depicting a phase of Bourgeois’s life, from partnership to pregnancy to childbirth. At the final hour: a print of Bourgeois’s famous spider, a symbol of her mother, with its long gangly legs. In spare sketches of coiling umbilical cords and swollen nipples, Bourgeois highlights the bodily form as a place of ambivalence, a home for motherhood as well as its accompanying loneliness.