Web of intrigue as giant spider legs it to Australia

It's a question gallery-goers don't usually need to ask: will there be giant spiders?

Yet for an upcoming exhibition by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois at the Art Gallery of NSW, it's a very relevant query - this is an artist who was nicknamed "spider woman".

Apologies arachnophobes, the biggest sculpture Bourgeois ever made, titled Maman, will be installed outside the gallery's new building - there simply wasn't enough room inside for all of its eight legs.

The famed nine-by-10 metre sculpture is on its way from Oslo to Sydney by ship.

The Bourgeois show is one of the biggest solo exhibitions dedicated to an international woman artist in Australia and it certainly has one of the longest names - Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?

The Bourgeois invasion is one of three major international exhibitions slated for this summer as part of the Sydney International Art Series starting in November.

The largest Kandinsky exhibition seen in Australia will also feature at the gallery, while a major show by British European artist Tacita Dean will run at the Museum of Contemporary Art from December.

Bourgeois will also be the first major solo exhibition for the AGNSW's new north building, almost a year since it opened.

She was born in Paris in 1911 and died in New York in 2010, producing her greatest works in the last decades of her life.

"She lived long enough to become a heroine, a very intense and revered grandmother to artists of the late 20th and early 21st century," said AGNSW head curator of international art Justin Paton.

Her work was peculiar, intimate and urgent, addressing womanhood and the contradictory business of selfhood, he said.

An example of her psychological complexities: Maman is dedicated to the artist's mother, who she said was "deliberate, clever, patient, soothing...and (as) useful as a spider".

As for the spiders, Bourgeois saw them as artists, architects and defenders, as well as creatures that create from the materials of their own bodies, like a mother or an artist, said Paton.

The road to the exhibition began in 2016, when the gallery acquired Bourgeois' Arched Figure 1993, made from bronze, fabric, wood and metal.

Gallery-goers will encounter 120 more works by Bourgeois, including fabric sculptures, works on paper, bronzes, audio recordings, film projections and even mechanised sculptures.

They will be presented in two contrasting exhibition spaces: against the white walls of the upper gallery, and in the building's underground Tank, a division that delineates both the tension and drama of her work, and the night and day of the show's title.

Of course, down in the dark of the Tank space (a former oil storage tank turned spooky gallery space) will lie another sculpture, titled Crouching Spider 2003.

Don't say you haven't been warned.

Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on November 25, while Kandinsky opens November 4.