MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ, born 1930 in Falenty near Warsaw, is one of Poland’s most acclaimed artists both at home and abroad, with a growing body of work in sculpture that has truly broken the mold. After studying painting from 1950-1954 at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Abakanowicz soon shifted her focus to sculpture, leading to a series of diverse, monumental “cycles” in which she employed a variety of materials and introduced into post-modern art the concept of the crowd, an idea with many ramifications for the artist, such as the multiplicity of only slightly varied “individuals”, each lost in the anonymity of “the countless”.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Space of Stone, 2002, 22 granite stones, Ground for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, USA

Her first major independent achievement were three-dimensional textile sculptures that she called "Abakans", woven from a variety of fibres, through which she indulged her fascination with the soft, loose fabric and its texture, combined with expressive color. Hung from the ceiling in a radical break from traditional decorative wall-hangings, her enormous, multiple, organic-looking shapes looked almost dangerous, resembling flakes of porous hide stripped off giant monsters, an effect enhanced by the artist's use of a very big, superhuman scale, the law of the series and activities reminiscent of environment art. Years later she wrote: "[They] irritated. They were untimely. There was the French tapestry in weaving, pop-art and conceptual art, and here there were some complicated, huge, magic [forms]..." Yet her "Abakans" delighted critics and viewers alike at the 1964 International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne and earned the artist the gold medal at the 1967 Sao Paulo Biennial, launching Abakanowicz's international reputation. "Abakans" reflected well Abakanowicz's sculptor-like approach to fabric and to technical possibilities of molding it. She took advantage of its softness, pliancy, and submissiveness to the artist's intentions. However, the huge, circular sheets remind one more of the animal than of the plant kingdom.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan Round, 1967, sisal weaving on metal support, 300 x 100 x 100 cm, and 3 Brown Abakans, 1969/1972, sisal weaving, 300 x 300 x 350 cm, collection of the artist

Abakanowicz has remained faithful to the law of the series, preferring sets to individual works. For an exhibition in the 70s called Organic Structures she placed a few dozen oval forms made of sackcloth and filled with a soft substance, the echo of a lasting childhood impression, which she reminiscences: "I was very young. I crouched down over a boggy pond to watch tadpoles [...] Years later things which were soft, with a complex tissue, became my material. I feel a relationship and kinship with the world which I do not want to know but through touching, feeling and relating to the part of myself which I carry deep inside me. [...] There is no tool between me and the material I create with. I choose it with my hands. I shape it with my hands. My hands transmit my energy to it. By translating an idea into a shape, they will always pass on something escaping conceptualization. They will reveal the unconscious".

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Embryology at the Venice Biennale 1980, 1978-1980, Burlap, cotton gauze, hemp rope, nylon and sisal, Approximately 800 pieces: from 4 to 250 cm long, Collection of the artist

Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of Warsaw Backs, 1990, burlap, resin, 40 pieces, each different, each about 80 x 70 x 75 cm, Collection of the Sezon Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

In the 70s Abakanowicz shifted to works with a harder surface – coarse sackcloth pieces bonded with synthetic resin, while continuing to create a succession of “series” or group sculptures, the figures hauntingly headless, as in Backs (1976-80) – 80 slightly differing “negatives” of the human trunk; The Crowd I (1986-7) – 50 standing figures; Ragazzi (1990) – 40 "skins" stripped off young boys; 30 Backward Seated Figures (1993-4), and 7 Dancing Figures (2001-2), among others. In the 1980s she also began using metal (mostly bronze), wood, stone, and sometimes clay.

At the same time, she was exploring and developing a shift in the very meaning of her sculpture from “objects to look at” into “spaces for contemplation”, where the tension of space invited the viewer to go in amongst the forms of petrified energy. The first was Katarsis (1986), thirty-three larger-than-life bronze humanoid figures in a permanent open-air display near Pistoia, Italy, that evokes a man of lost identity, an androgenic everyman, and, as she puts it, "man's horrible powerlessness against his biological structure".

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Katarsis, 1985, bronze, 33 figures, each ca. 270 x 100 x 50 cm, collection: Giuliano Gori, "Spazi d'Arte", Italy

It was only in the late 80s that the normally reticent Abakanowicz started to comment more extensively about her life and work. Shy by nature and lonely in the creative process, it is said she has made her contact with people primarily through her more than one hundred personal exhibitions, which she arranged herself as "still ceremonies". She went on to receive large outdoor commissions in Japan, South Korea, Israel, Lithuania, and other countries, where she has created out of bronze or stone many of these enormous "spaces for contemplation". In the view of many, very few images in contemporary art are as emotive or as disturbing.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Negev, 1987, limestone, 7 discs dia. 280 cm, width 60 cm, collection: Israel Museum, Sculpture Garden, Jerusalem

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Unrecognized 2001-2002, from the series Crowd, group of 112 figures, 2001/2002, iron cast, each ca 210 x 70 x 95 cm, City of Poznan, Cytadela Park

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Agora, 2005-2006, iron, 106 figures 285-295 x 95-100 x 135-145 cm, Permanent installation in Grant Park, Chicago

Abakanowicz has had over 150 solo exhibitions in Europe, North and South America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, including major shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris, Hiroshima City Museum, Museum Sonje in Kyongju, Korea, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, National Museum in Wroclaw, and the National Museum in Poznan, Poland.

She has also participated in major international art reviews, notably in Lausanne (from 1962 to 1976 and in 1985), Venice (1968, 1980, 1995), São Paulo (1965), Antwerp (International Open Air Sculpture Biennial, 1983), Sydney (1986).

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Figure on Trunk at the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum 1999, 1998, bronze, 244 x 262 x 61 cm, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Among numerous prizes and distinctions, Abakanowicz has received six honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the United States (including Royal College of Art, London, and School of the Art Institute, Chicago) as well as the Commodore's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta from Poland and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from France. She has been a guest lecturer in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Boston, New York, San Diego, Sydney and Tokyo. For 25 years she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (1965-1990), and currently she lives and works in Warsaw.

Based in part on: Magdalena Abakanowicz by Malgorzata Kitowska-Lysiak, Art History Institute of the Catholic University of Lublin, 2004, www.culture.pl, and

http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl/

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Standing Shape, 1965, steel, 650 x 150 x 100 cm, Collection: City of Elblag, Poland