Magdalena Abakanowicz ( ; 20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. Known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations, Abakanowicz has been considered among the most influential Polish artists of the postwar era. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.

She was born to a noble landowning family in Falenty, near Warsaw, before the outbreak of World War II. Her formative years were marred by the Nazi occupation of Poland, during which her family became part of the Polish resistance. After the war, under the imposed communist rule, Abakanowicz attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950 and 1954, navigating a conservative educational environment marked by the imposition of Soviet-dictated restrictive and propagandistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.

The Polish October and subsequent political and cultural thaw in 1956 marked a significant turning point in Abakanowicz's career. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abakanowicz's work began to take on more structure and geometric form, influenced in part by Constructivism. Her one-person exhibit at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in 1960 signaled her emergence in the Polish textile and fiber design movement. She received first international recognition following her participation in the first Biennale Internationale de le Tapisserie in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962.

Abakanowicz's most celebrated works emerged in the 1960s with her creation of three-dimensional fiber works called Abakans. During the 1970s and 1980s, she transitioned to creating humanoid sculptures. These works reflected the anonymity and confusion of the individual amidst the human mass, a theme influenced by her life under a Communist regime. Some of her prominent international public artworks include Agora in Chicago and Birds of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Milwaukee.

Early life

Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz (married name Kosmowska) was born to a noble landowning family in the village of Falenty, near Warsaw. Her mother, Helena Domaszewska, descended from old Polish nobility. Her father, Konstanty Abakanowicz, came from a Polonized Lipka Tatar family that traced its origins to Abaqa Khan, a 13th-century Mongol chieftain.

When she was nine, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. Her family endured the war years living on the outskirts of Warsaw and became part of the Polish resistance. Other art forms being practiced at the time in the Western Bloc, such as Modernism, were officially outlawed and heavily censored in all Communist Bloc nations, including Poland. Lack of official approval did nothing to reduce her enthusiasm or alter the revolutionary course of her work.

Education

Abakanowicz completed part of her high school education in Tczew from 1945 to 1947, after which she went to Gdynia for two additional years of art school at the Liceum Sztuk Plastycznych in that city. After her graduation from the Liceum in 1949, Abakanowicz attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot (now in Gdańsk). In 1950, Abakanowicz moved back to Warsaw to begin her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts there, To get into the Academy she had to pretend to be the daughter of a clerk, because her noble background would otherwise have prevented her acceptance on the course. The Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, being the most important artistic institution in Poland, came under special scrutiny from the Ministry of Art and Culture, which administered all major decisions in the field at the time.

Abakanowicz found the climate at the Academy to be highly "rigid" and overly "conservative". She recalled:

It was also during this time that the Polish People's Republic began to lift some of the heavy political pressures imposed by the Soviet Union, mainly due to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. In 1956, under the new party leadership of Władysław Gomułka, Poland experienced a dramatic social and cultural shift during the Polish October. The shift resulted in the liberalization of the forms and content of art, with Stalinist methods of art form being openly criticized by Gomułka's government.

A major freedom granted to Polish artists was the permission to travel to several Western cities, such as Paris, Venice, Munich, and New York City, to experience artistic developments outside the communist countries. This liberalization of the arts in Poland and injection of other art forms into the Polish art world greatly influenced Abakanowicz's early works, as she began to consider much of her early work as being too flamboyant and lacking in structure. As a result, she soon adopted weaving as another avenue of artistic exploration.

In her first one-person exhibit at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in the spring of 1960, she included a series of four weavings along with a collection of gouaches and watercolors. Though her first exhibit received minimal critical notice, it helped advance her position within the Polish textile and fiber design movement and resulted in her inclusion into the first Biennale Internationale de le Tapisserie in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962. The event opened the way to her international success.

Series

thumb|[[Nasher Sculpture Center, Untitled, 1980–1983. This image is a detail of Untitled, one of the largest sisal weavings Abakanowicz ever made.|alt=]]

Abakans

The 1960s saw some of the most important works produced during Abakanowicz's career. In 1967, she began producing three-dimensional fiber works called Abakans. Her Abakans were included in a group exhibition titled, Wall Hangings, organised in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Mildred Constantine, curator of architecture and design, and the textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. Abakanowicz and the other artists included in the exhibition were pushing boundaries between high art and traditional definitions of what was considered craft. Her use of "unexpected, often soft materials, arranged in modular or serial structures” in her Abakan series, places her within the Postminimalism art movement that began in 1966. Abakanowicz stated that she sought the “total obliteration of the utilitarian function of tapestry” and demonstrated the capacity of fiber to produce forms that were soft yet structured and complex. She also used "rope, hemp, flax, wool and horsehair." Hung from the ceiling, Abakans reach sizes as large as thirteen feet with sometimes only a few inch clearance from the ground. The Abakans often incorporated reproductive references to eggs and the womb.

One of her large Abakans is included in the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. The piece hangs on the wall and is made of five large recycled sisal panels in varying thickness and dyed in a burnt umber color. The work was acquired in 2019 and was exhibited in an exhibition titled Resist/Release.

In October 2023, Abakanowicz's pioneering textile art served as inspiration for the latest collection from the Alexander McQueen fashion house, which debuted at the Paris Fashion Week. The designs were created by Sarah Burton and were met with high acclaim as they were presented alongside two Abakans from the collection of the Central Textile Museum in Łódź.

Humanoid sculptures

During the 1970s, and into the 1980s, Abakanowicz changed medium and scale; she began a series of figurative and non-figurative sculptures made out of pieces of coarse sackcloth which she sewed and pieced together and bonded with synthetic resins. These works became more representational than previous sculptures but still retain a degree of abstraction and ambiguity. In 1974-1975 she produced sculptures called Alterations, which were twelve hollowed-out headless human figures sitting in a row. From 1973–1975 she produced a series of enormous, solid forms reminiscent of human heads without faces called Heads. From 1976-1980 she produced a piece call Backs, which was a series of eighty slightly differing sculptures of the human trunk.

In 1986-87 she created a series of fifty standing figures called Crowd I. She also began to once again work around organic structures, such as her Embryology series, which consisted of several dozen soft egg-like lumps varying in size. These were dispersed round an exhibition room at the Vienna Biennial in 1980.

thumb|upright=1.35|Space of Unknown Growth (1997–1998) at the [[Europos Parkas, Lithuania]]

These humanoid works of the 1970s and 1980s were centered around human culture and nature as a whole and its condition and position in modern society. The multiplicity of the human forms represents confusion and anonymity, analyzing an individual's presence in a mass of humanity. These works have close connections to Abakanowicz's life living in a Communist regime which repressed individual creativity and intellect in favor of the collective interest. These works also contrast with her earlier Abakan series, which were individually powerful pieces, whereas the figurative sculptures lost their individuality in favor of multiplicity.

In the late 1980s to 1990s Abakanowicz began to use metals, such as bronze, for her sculptures, as well as wood, stone, and clay. Her works from this period include Bronze Crowd (1990–91), shown in the garden of the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Puellae (1992), part of the National Gallery of Art's collection. She stated in a speech given at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź:

From September 27, 2014, to September 27, 2015, the National Museum of Women in the Arts displayed Abakanowicz’s large scale bronze sculptures of humans and birds in its New York Avenue Sculpture Project.

In 2019, her work featuring humanoid sculptures entitled Caminando, from the private collection of Robin Williams, set a new record at auction for an artwork sold in Poland by fetching 8 million zlotys (ca. US$2.1 million). This record was broken again twice in 2021 when in October another of her works known as Crowd III (1989) fetched 13.2 million zlotys (ca. $3.3 million) while in December her Bambini (1999) set of sculptures was sold for 13.6 million zloty.

War Games

One of Abakanowicz's most unusual works is titled War Games, which is a cycle of monumental structures made up of huge trunks of old trees, with their branches and bark removed. Partly bandaged with rags and hugged by steel hoops, these sculptures are placed on lattice metal stands. Like the name of the cycle implies, these sculptures have a very militaristic feel to them, as they have been compared to artillery vehicles.

  • Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Awards

  • Grand Prix of São Paulo Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil (1965)
  • Herder Prize, Vienna, Austria (1979)
  • Jurzykowski Prize, New York City (1982)
  • Award for Distinction in Sculpture, granted by the Sculpture Center, New York (1993)
  • Commander Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1998)
  • Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, Berlin, Germany (1999)
  • Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France (1999)
  • Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts, Norway (1999)
  • Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2000)
  • Visionaries! Award granted by American Craft Museum (2000)
  • Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, International Sculpture Center, (Hamilton, NJ) (2005)
  • Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany with a star (2010)

On 20 June 2023 she was the subject of a Google Doodle.

Doctorates and honors

thumb|right|[[University of Fine Arts in Poznań|University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, which bears Abakanowicz's name since January 2021]]

  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, England (1974)
  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island (1992)
  • Honorary member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin (1994)
  • Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City (1996)
  • Honorary member of the Sachsische Akademie der Kunste, Dresden, Germany (1998)
  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts, Łódź, Poland (1998)
  • Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree, Pratt Institute, New York (2000)
  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2001)
  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland (2002)
  • Honoris Causa doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2002)

Quotes

thumb|right|Abakanowicz's tombstone at the [[Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw, Poland]]

"I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm."

"Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind."

See also

  • Abakanowicz
  • List of Polish artists

References

Notes

Bibliography

  • Reichardt, Jasia. Magdalena Abakanowicz. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. 188 pp. 152 color and BW illus.
  • Abakanowicz, Magdalena, et al. Magdalena Abakanowicz. Davidson College, 2010.
  • Inglot, Joanna. The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, and Myths. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004.
  • Miller, Nancy, et al. Figuratively Speaking : Drawings by Seven Artists. Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase, 1989.
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz at culture.pl
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO