Evoking the corporal themes of motherhood, sexuality and femininity intrinsic to Louise Bourgeois’s celebrated oeuvre, Mamelles is one of the artist’s most widely exhibited sculptural works. Charged with symbolic power, the present work is both explicit and implicit in its depiction of the female body: at once nurturing and highly sexualised, sixteen pink breasts undulate across the horizontal surface, reminding the viewer of the feminine body. Critic, curator and writer Robert Storr articulates, “Breasts are the primary site of sexual activity in Bourgeois’s work, subsuming both adult stimulation and her excitation and frustration of nursing” (R. Storr, Intimate Geometries, The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, London 2016, p. 298). On the surface of the present work, the fleshy pink rubber breasts appear to fold in on themselves, performing the juxtapositions central to Bourgeois’s versatile sculptural practice: hard versus soft, interior versus exterior, overt versus subtle, naturalistic versus abstracted. Mamelles thus exemplifies the maternal, female body in a state of perpetual flux, metamorphosing and swelling on a monumental scale. While two works from the edition are held in the collections of Tate, London and Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, others have been included in some of Bourgeois’s most significant retrospectives over the past thirty years at prestigious institutions in New York, Paris, Madrid, Edinburgh, Stockholm, São Paolo, Buenos Aires and Yokohama, to name only a few.

Overwhelmingly feminine, the biomophic landscape of the present work alludes to Bourgeois’s investigation into themes of motherhood and sexuality, which she began exploring at the beginning of her career in the 1940s but returned to again five decades later. Executed in 1991, Mamelles – meaning breasts or udders in English – signifies a moment in Bourgeois’s practice during which she was actively engaged in creating works that symbolised a multitude of maternal evocations: her mother, herself as a mother, and indeed the archetypal, idealised notion of motherhood that Bourgeois felt she failed to achieve. Storr describes the complexity of Bourgeois’s maternal iconography: “Indeed, in other related works, such as the pink rubber wall relief Mamelles, 1991, that [Bourgeois] showed when representing the United States in the American pavilion in the 1993 Venice Biennale… the nipples of the rolling wave of breasts – reminiscent of the rolling waves of eyes inspired by Dali’s treatment of the same subject that she drew in the 1970s – are like spokes intended to fend off rather than welcome an infantile mouth, or for that matter, an adult one. Like many other images from this period, The She-Fox and her spawn are icons of a deeply wounded but potentially wounding femininity, of the forbidding Terrible Mother rather than the all-embracing Good Mother for whom Bourgeois longed but was angrily, hurtfully incapable of being” (Ibid., p. 298). Held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The She-Fox is an apt point of comparison to present work; executed only six years earlier, the former, too, exemplifies an ambiguous, anthropomorphic form strikingly gendered by means of enlarged, swollen breasts.

Bourgeois’s investigation into themes of motherhood draws upon her complex relationship with her own mother, Joséphine. The tension between the two during Bourgeois’s childhood was augmented by her mother’s toleration of her father’s ongoing infidelity. Joséphine Bourgeois’s illness, and eventual untimely death when the artist was only twenty-one years old, resulted in a profound feeling of abandonment, a sentiment that would inform Bourgeois’s feelings towards her own role as a mother. Vincent Honoré explains the artist’s arduous approach to motherhood: “Maternity is a recurrent theme in Bourgeois’s work and her view of it is complex and changeable. It frequently centres around the culture of the tragic, guilty mother, at once protective and predatory… She rejects 'the representation of ideal motherhood still almost exclusively made up of self-abnegation, unstinting love, intuitive knowledge or nurturance and unalloyed pleasure in children', preferring a powerful mother whose modernity draws on classical roots… motherhood assumes a potentially ferocious guise; the figure of the Medusa is not far away” (V. Honoré cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Louise Bourgeois, 2007, p. 170). This weighty sentiment of insecurity and fear is bolstered by a diary entry Bourgeois wrote in March 1975, “You need a mother. I understand but I refuse to be your mother because I need a mother myself” (M. Bernadac and H.U. Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, London 1998, p. 72). In turn, Mamelles is emblematic of Bourgeois’s vacillation between fear and love, ferocity and softness, predatory and nurturing in her approach to the subject of mothering and motherhood.

Executed in the form of a large-scale wall relief, Mamelles mimics the composition of a classical frieze, its repetitive undulation running horizontally across a wall. Bourgeois’s continuous, rolling imagery is perhaps reminiscent of the presentation of figures parading across the Parthenon frieze. A monumental sculpture of the High Classical Style dating between circa 443 and 437 B.C., this early sculptural feat signifies a period during which artists began exploring for the first time the expressive possibilities of the human body, in turn articulating corporeal imagery with greater freedom and gesture. Art historian Larry Qualls comments on Bourgeois’s tendency to draw upon the long and revered history of classical sculpture: “The works are intensely personal, sometimes wrenchingly so, and yet they speak to the mystery at the heart of existence in the way that the religious art of ancient Greece… or the Middle Ages address the transpersonal directly” (L. Qualls, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Art of Memory’, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 1994, pp. 40-41). Yet in its continuous line of iconography, Mamelles also subverts and debases any notion of classical convention, both in its provocative subject matter, and it its lack of traditional narrative.

Executed during the eightieth year of Bourgeois’s life, Mamelles re-addresses themes of motherhood, fertility and maternity during her old age. Bourgeois’s late sculptural practice draws upon, and indeed subverts, Simone de Beauvoir’s theory that women are frightened by the ageing process, rather, “Bourgeois performs age differently, modeling the polarities that inform our cultural expectations of women in terms of youth and age and transmuting them in the process, presenting a creative female body that is not post-reproductive but productive, a new kind of female body in older age, one that is in fact appearing on the world stage” (K. Woodward, ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender,’ NWSA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 2006, p. 170). Stripped bare and vulnerable, the female body on the surface of Mamelles becomes a potent symbol of love and anguish, in turn epitomising Bourgeois’s profoundly personal synthesis of the maternal experience.