Louise Bourgeois’s large bronze and steel “Spider” sculptures, which she began making in the 1990s, have been exhibited around the world at various indoor and outdoor venues, including the Plaza at Rockefeller Center and the grand Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern. In those urban spaces, however, the nearby architecture can act unwittingly against them. The buildings often dwarf the creatures — which, as with her spider “Maman” (1999), are sometimes over 30 feet tall — or they set up an unshakable context, one in which you feel as if you have stumbled onto the set of a sci-fi horror film.

This is not the case in the idyllic setting of the Storm King Art Center, where Ms. Bourgeois is the subject this summer of a concentrated, mostly indoor exhibit of roughly 20 of her “clustered” works. There, among the hills, woodlands, and fields of Storm King’s 500-acre park, her 10-foot-high bronze “Spider” (1996) is more natural, lissome, and charming — more spidery — than I have ever seen it.

“Spider” is an unusual departure for Ms. Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in Paris in 1911, studied painting with Fernand Léger (who believed that she was a sculptor, not a painter), and then moved to New York in 1938, where she continues to live and to sculpt. Most of Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures are confessional and they are inspired by Surrealism. They rely on strange juxtapositions and on the metaphors of growth, the house, or cage, and, specifically, the human body.

Resembling phalluses, breasts, totems prisons, or amalgamations of human flora, and fauna, Ms. Bourgeois’s works generally tend to be too heavy-handed illustrative, and literal for my taste. Initially they may take their cues from Arp Brancusi, Noguchi, and Henry Moore but they rarely adequately merge, transform, and transcend their references The pink marble and steel “Nature Study, Pink Fountain” (1984) is reminiscent of a small ancient sarcophagus. Inside, numerous carved smooth breast forms with long nipples line the walls. In “Untitled (With Growth)” (1989), a grouping of highly polished phalluses or finger forms, waving like fronds, extends out of a rough-hewn marble block. Both of these sculptures, though not without merit, feel as if they could benefit from a little sublimation. Ms. Bourgeois’s urges as an artist, however, are anything but sublimated.

This is one of the reasons I have always been drawn to the straightforwardness of the artist’s “Spider” sculptures — to their delicately nimble legs, which simultaneously reach and withdraw and test their footings; and which, as with Giacometti’s “Dog,” encompass the fullness and otherness of the animal. Her “Spider” legs can make a cement plaza feel as springy as a web. I had always experienced these sculptures in terms of a grandiose Surrealism, but at Storm King it is as if her “Spider” has been released from Surrealist captivity into its natural habitat. Like Storm King’s other large outdoor sculptures by Calder, David Smith, and di Suvero, “Spider,” both industrial and organic, fits in quite naturally as another anomaly among anomalies.

Storm King’s show, organized by David Collens, celebrates the conservation and reinstallation of the artist’s “Number Seventy-Two (The No March)” (1972), a floor work comprising 1,200 cylindrical pieces of marble and travertine. The cylinders are of various sizes, colors, and textures. None is taller than 20 inches, and they are cut at various angles and arranged in a tightly packed rectangle. The sculpture was originally installed at Storm King under a tree, where its cylinders conjured up stumps, sprouts, and decapitated mushrooms, as if each were turning to face the sun. However, outside and unmonitored, the sculpture’s forms were often moved or stolen. Now, pushed into the corner of an indoor gallery, it is installed as it was first exhibited at the 1973 Whitney Biennial.

The aluminum outdoor piece “In and Out #2” (1995–96), a freestanding huddled mass or podlike sculpture with legs, humps, and an undulating tail, is close in spirit to the indoor works “Avenza,” in latex and fiberglass, and “Avenza Revisited II,” in bronze and silver nitrate (both 1968–69). Yet outdoors, the roughness of their skins can be compared to earth and bark, and their elephantine haunch, droop, and step are accentuated.

Inside, the works can begin to close down. “Number Seventy-Two” feels imitative of, and removed from, nature — as if, like a collection of natural specimens, it is out of context. If you have seen the work outside, you may believe, as I do, that there is something sad about its indoor installation, where it can begin to have the quality of a potted plant or of a caged bird.

Still, the show is exquisitely installed, and one of the best works on view happens to be inside. “The Blind Leading the Blind” (1947–49) is a work made of tapered bronze legs, painted black and red, attached to a stainless steel base. The sculpture’s 14 vertical legs are grouped in a line in pairs, and they support a horizontal stacking of four more forms, or legs, overhead. The sculpture is primitive and totemic, and it resembles spindles, teeth, a fence, and oars, as well as a sacred procession. The vertical legs are slightly staggered, giving the sculpture the sense that it is walking. It gets heavier as it rises, and its top is angled like the long approach to a shrine. “The Blind Leading the Blind” suggests the burden of the group, the carrying and sacrifice of that burden, as well as the monument to honor the sacrifice.

I had seen “The Blind Leading the Blind” on at least one other occasion, yet it was not memorable. One of Ms. Bourgeois’s earliest sculptures, it, and the rest of this show, demands to be seen afresh in Storm King’s constantly changing, and illuminating, environment.

Until November 15 (Storm King Art Center, Old Pleasant Hill Road, Mountainville, N.Y., 845-534-3155).