Magdalena Abakanowicz 1930 —

"I feel overwhelmed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense, by unrepeatability within such quantity.  A crowd of people or birds, insect or leaves, is a mysterious assemblage of variants of a certain prototype, a riddle of nature abhorrent to exact repetition or inability to produce it, just as a human hand can not repeat its own gesture".

Magdalena Abakanowicz (For many years Abakanowicz has dealt with the issue of "the countless".)

Abakanowicz changed the meaning of sculpture from an object to look at into space to experience.  Shy by nature and lonely in the creative process, she creates large bronze or stone “spaces to contemplate”, whether with physically large of small objects.  Each of her forms, figurative or non-figurative is rich in its own history.  These ambiguous images shoulder many meanings.

Her present work shows figures walking or standing, together, hesitating, going nowhere.  Seen from the front, their bodies are like wooden trunks cut with an ax to get the general shape.  Yet the figures are shell like: their insides are formed by relief drawings, different for each sculpture.  These figures oblige us to think, like we are being confronted with ourselves.

Magdalena Abakanowicz - Biography

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in an aristocratic Polish-Russian family on her parent’s estate in Poland. The WW II broke out when she was nine years old. Then came the revolution imposed by Russia and forty-five years of Soviet domination followed.  Poland was a politically volatile country where instability was a permanent state. She has learned to escape to her corner, to make the best of things, to use whatever was viable and even to make gigantic works in a tiny studio. Her art has always addressed the problems of dignity and courage. This dignity, resistance and will of survival, conceal her individual personal affinities to the culture of Poland, the country where she has grown up, to this country’s political situation, and to the realities of existence of an artist, an intellectual.

The metaphoric language of her work has achieved a point of junction, which still is a challenge for mankind, for all its sophisticated civilisation. This is the point where the organic meets the non - organic, where the still alive meets that which is already dead, where all that exist in oppression meet all that strive for liberation in every meaning of this word. With forty years of work behind her one can see her development like a map unfolded on the table.

On this map the human figure belongs to a vast territory inhabited by crowds and flocks of headless figures. The idea of a crowd has many reverberations in her mind. One of them is the transformation of an individual into a cog. Abakanowicz says: "I immerse in the crowd, like a grain of sand in the friable sands. I am fading among the anonymity of glances, movements, smells, in the common absorption of air, in the common pulsation of juices under the skin...” The entire population of her figures is enough to fill a large public square. They are today over thousand but they have never been seen together. They remain in various museums, public and private collections in different parts of the world. They constitute a warning, a lasting anxiety.

Very few images in contemporary art are as emotive and as disturbing. She started with soft and pliable objects that were rough to the touch. First came the ‘Abakans’ (1966-75), so-called after her own name. These enormous three-dimensional hanging structures, woven form a variety of fibres. Michael Brenson has referred to as not only objects but also spaces. To enter the ‘Abakans’ and to remain inside them is to allow the sensation of interiority to become a condition.

Other soft works included ‘Embryology’ – a sequence of some 800 stuffed potato-shaped forms of varying sizes, covered with sacking and occasionally spilling their innards.

Shy by nature and lonely in the creative process, she has made her contact with people through over one hundred personal exhibitions, which she arranged herself as "still ceremony" hidden behind which she felt secure. She went on to receive large outdoor commissions in Italy, Japan, S.Korea, Israel, Lithuania and other countries she built out of bronze or stone large "spaces to contemplate", where the tension of space invited the viewer to go between the forms of petrified energy. Each of her forms figurative or non - figurative is rich in its own history. Abakanowicz changed the meaning of sculpture, from object to look at, into space to experience.

Abakanowicz, creates ambiguous images with many meanings. Some are concealed, some combined with others. These are what every viewer must find for him or herself. To reveal them all would be to tell the reader how a film ends.

In 1965, Abakanowicz became a member of Z.A.I.K.S.—the Union of Polish Artists, Writers and Composers. She also obtained a position as an instructor at the National College of Fine Art in Poznah. She rose to the level of associate professor in 1974, and full professor in 1979. She remained until 1990, when she retired from teaching to devote her full energy to her own work.

There are four important books about Abakanowicz: 1982 by Jasia Reichardt, Abbeville Press; 1994, by Barbara Rose, H.N.Abrams; 1995 by Michael Brenson and Magdalena Abakanowicz, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; 1996, by Jasia Reichardt, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Magdalena Abakanowicz – Works in Public Collections

Selected Museums  and Private Collections include:  Australian National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia ; Caracas Museum of Modern Art, Caracas, Venezuela ; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland ; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France ; Citadel Park, Poznan, Poland ; Chicago Grant Park, Chicago, USA ; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, USA ; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA ; Giuliano Gori, "Spazi d'Arte", Fattoria di Celle, Italy ; Ground for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, USA ; Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan ; HessCollection, Napa Valley, California, USA ; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan ; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., USA ; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel ; Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France ; Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo, Norway ; Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, Japan ; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA ; Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA ; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA ; Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, USA ; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA ; Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw, Poland ; Muzeum Narodowe, Wroclaw, Poland ; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland ;Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain ;Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico ;Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, Japan ;Museum Wurth, Kunzelsau, Germany ;Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan ;Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA ;National Museum of Modern Art, Pusan, South Korea ;National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. ;National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea ; National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden ;Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Germany ;Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA ;Phoenix Art Museum Sculpture Garden, Phoenix, USA ;Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, USA ;Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, USA ;Provinciehuis, s-Hertogenbosch, Holland ;Runnymede Sculpture Farm, California, USA ;Seoul Olympic Park, Seoul, South Korea ;Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan ;Sonja Henies Niels Onstads Stiftelser, Kunstsenter Hovikodden, Norway ;Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland ;Storm King Art Center, USA ;Sun Jeu Museum, South Korea ;Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA ;Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA ;Western Washington University, Bellingham, USA
Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany ;Woman's Club of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA ;Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia, USA

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