Louise Bourgeois

The title of this phallic sculpture means ‘little girl’, an ironic disjunction of word and object. Bourgeois has talked about this work in relation to her experiences as a wife, and a mother to three boys, which led her to see masculinity as far more vulnerable than she had imagined. ‘From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate’, she explained. ‘They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.’ The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe famously portrayed Bourgeois with a version of this work tucked playfully under her arm.