Gorky was greatly influenced by surrealism, an artistic, cultural and intellectual movement concerned with the subconscious mind and the borders of rationality and reason. How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life was included in Gorky's 1945 exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City, a bastion of surrealism. The titles of the paintings in Gorky's exhibition were all arrived at in discussion with the influential poet and proponent of surrealism, Andre Breton. With Breton's aid, Gorky developed appropriately poetic yet slippery titles, like The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl, One Year the Milkweed, The Horns of the Landscape, and The Love of a New Gun. How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life was one of the last paintings he completed in 1944. In a letter to his sister from December of that year, Gorky mentioned that the work was inspired by their mother's apron from their former home in Aikesdan, Armenia.

Gorky's family was fodder for his art, both in straightforward portraits such as The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1926-36, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, or in more allusive landscapes, such as Garden in Sochi, 1941 (Museum of Modern Art), which has been described as a reminiscence of the "cloth trees" of the Armenian landscape of his youth.  Photographs survive that show the artist's mother wearing a highly patterned apron dress, but we are left to wonder how closely the abstract tangle of gestures in How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life might be based on the object in its title. It is perhaps more fruitful to do as Andre Breton suggests and see in this painting a hybridized evocation of many states of being. There is clear drawing in the piece, delineating a loose web of forms that can range from the figural to the botanical or natural, but it is the drips and effusions of color that destabilize any easy reading of the work and push it into a highly ambiguous realm. This kind of dreamlike evocation, wafting in and out of recognition, is the real power of the work and encourages the viewer to find more solid meaning in its composition. By relinquishing any responsibility for making a faithful representation of something known in the world, Gorky freed himself (and subsequent generations of artists) to explore the unexplainable depths of consciousness and perception.