The Bugs are Taking Over

London's arachnophobics have had a trying month. The arrival of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern, and two smaller commercial shows of her more recent work at Marlborough Fine Art and Hauser Wirth Colnaghi, has sent them scurrying out of the galleries and averting their eyes. 'Maman', in particular, must be causing special difficulty. 35-feet high, made of bronze and guarding the Southwark end of the Millennium Bridge, it serves as the perfect symbol of the 96 year-old Bourgeois's art - patient and cunning, while simultaneously tender, playful and dangerous. Spiders recur this way throughout her work in various etchings, drawings, and sculptures, suggesting not just that fierce power of motherhood but also the darker shadows of human psychology.

It is salutary to contrast Bourgeois with Dali (subject of the previous Tate Modern exhibition). For though he looms large as the twentieth-century's documentarist of the unconscious, Dali simply pales in comparison with Bourgeois. He simply tries too hard, like an eager-to-please schoolboy, piling Pelion on Ossa in evermore elaborate imagery. Bourgeois, meanwhile, sticks to a carefully limited library of images - spiders, ladders, the female anatomy, hands, flight, maisons and escaliers by which she has consistently defined, dreamt and re-imagined her own relationship with the world over the course of seventy years.

And the use of such a range of materials in her sculptural work - marble, rubber, plaster, cloth, bronze, and wood - enables a fresh, tactile and insightful body of work from these repeated symbols. Her larger installations operate in similar ways; rooms of the mind formed from mirrors, grills, guillotines, drab bistro-brown doors and human ephemera harking back to a mid-twentieth century anguish that is at once personal to Bourgeois and yet universal. They suggest repression or containment, fear and labyrinthine evasion. These remain urgent and yet humane works, representing as Bourgeois puts it, 'a guarantee of sanity'. So, please do yourself a tremendous favour: go to this show and let the bugs take you over.

Louise Bourgeois Retrospective:
Tate Modern, London - 10th October 2007 - 20th January 2008
Centre Pompidou, Paris - 5th March 2008 - 2nd June 2008
Guggenheim, New York - 27th June 2008 - 28th September 2008
Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A. - 26th October 2008 - 26th January 2009
Hirschhorn Museum, Washington DC, 28th February 2009 - 7th June 2009

Louise Bourgeois, New Work:
Hauser Wirth Colnaghi, London 10th October 2007 - 17th November 2007.