Magdalena Abakanowicz
ABAKAN RED 1969
1969, sisal weaving on metal
support
300 x 300 x 100 cm
•Magdalena Abakanowicz (born June 20, 1930, in Falenty, Poland) is
a Polish sculptor.
•Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in an aristocratic Polish-Russian
family on her parent’s estate in Poland. The war broke out when she
was nine years old. Then came the revolution imposed by Russia and
the forty-five years of Soviet domination.
•Magdalena was 12 years old in 1942 when she experianced the war
in Poland first hand. “One could only escape from the human cruelty
inside oneself (into the world of dreams and imagination)…” Magda
remembers starting to work with cloth because it could be folded and
stored under the bed.
•Magda graduated the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 1956 and
began work at Milanowek as a tie designer in a silk factory.
•In her free time she taught herself how to weave. She loved the
uneven surface that she was creating on her frame loom.
Magdalena Abakanowicz in Maria
Laszkiewicz’s basement, warsaw,1964
•In 1962 She was commissioned by the polish government to create a piece
for the 1st International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland. It
required a tapestry be no less than 12 square meters. Weaving with clothes
line and rope, her unique piece made a great impact in the show.
“Composition of white Forms” 1961-62
Part of the 1st Lausanne Tapestry Biennial,
Switzerland
Magdalena Abakanowicz “Dorota”1964
•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.
•In the late 1980s to 1990s Abakanowicz began to use metals, such
as bronze, for her sculptures, as well as wood, stone, and clay.
•She is notable for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and is
regarded as being one of the most important and influential female artists
of the 20th century.
•She has been a professor at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor
at UCLA in 1984. Magdalena Abakanowicz currently lives and works
in Warsaw.
Magdalena Abakanowicz with
students at the University of
Poznan, Poland, 1981
ROPE INSTALLATION ON BALTIC DUNE
1968
• At first Magda created the pieces herself than she she had
others help her the prep work in creating her pieces (washing
dyeing, winding the tread and the countless tasks before
starting to weave the piece).
• The materials fro her pieces can from a variety of sources,
mostly cast-offs from different factories. Hemp flax, sisal from
shoe factories. Horsehair and wool from the countryside.
• Maga believed in all organic processes and that were
traditional materials of the past. This enabled her to
manipulate both nature and the past. She works with her
hands and thinks of her work as a protest against the misuses
of the environment.
• “I like neither rules nor prescriptions, these
enemies of imagination”
• In 1966 she create her first woven forms that
were independent of the walls and existed in
space. “ My particular aim is to create
possibilities for complete communion with an
object whose structure is complex and soft. “
BLACK ENVIRONMENT
1970-78, sisal weaving, fifteen pieces
each on metal support
fifteen pieces, each :
300 x 80 x 80 cm
Magdalena Abakanowicz in front of Bois-le-Due 1970-71 It was the largest of her
compostion at the time. 2 X 20 X 2 meters. Like many of her pieces at the time.
Some of the segments turn into bronze towards one end and others into red.
Sampler
• SCHIZOID HEADS
1973-75, Burlap and hemp
rope on metal support
Sixteen pieces: from 84 x
51 x 66 cm to 109 x 76 x
71 cm
•Art needs somebody to listen to its message, somebody to desire it,
somebody to drink it, to use it like wine - otherwise it makes no
sense.
•What is sculpture? With impressive continuity it testifies to man's
evolving sense of reality, and fulfils the necessity to express what
cannot be verbalized.
• 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 for many
years has dealt with the issue of
"the countless". She says: "I feel
overwhelmed by quantity where
counting no longer makes sense.
• 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".
•
•
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 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.
SEATED FIGURES
1974-79, figures: burlap and
resin, pedestal: steel
Eighteen pieces, each figure ca.
104 x 51 x 66 cm
• Each of her figures is an individuality, with its own
expression, with specific details of skin.
• Organic, with the imprint of the artist's fingers. Their
surface is natural like tree bark or animal fur or wrinkled
skin.
• Like all her sculptures also these works are unique objects.
“The Session (16 Backs) 1976-77 at the
Malmo Konsthall.Sweden
“Backs” 1976-81
Musee d’Art
Moderne de la Ville
de Paris
AGORA
2005-2006, iron
106 figures 285-295 x 95-100 x 135145 cm
Permanent installation in Grant Park,
Chicago
• 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.