Magdalena Abakanowicz

Magdalena Abakanowicz (Falenty, 20 giugno 1930 – Varsavia, 20 aprile 2017) è stata una scultrice polacca.

Nacque nel 1930 a Falenty, vicino a Varsavia. Nel 1954 completò gli studi all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Varsavia. È professoressa all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Poznań.
Nel 1965 ha ricevuto la medaglia d'oro durante la VII Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte a San Paolo. Nel 1972 ha ottenuto il premio statale di primo rango della Repubblica Polacca.
Viveva e lavorava a Varsavia.

I progetti più importanti

Alteracje
Ragazzi
Katharsis-33 (vicino a Pistoia)
Negev-7 (in Israel)
Nierozpoznani
Tłum I e Tłum II

Czarna, 1966

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Yellow Abakan. 1967–68, sisal.

©MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ/THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, GIFT OF MR. WALTER BAREISS, MRS. WATSON K. BLAIR, MR. ARTHUR COHEN, MR. DON PAGE, AND ANONYMOUS DONOR, 1974

“Abakan Red” (1969), a work in sisal and mixed media by Ms. Abakanowicz. Magdalena Abakanowicz, via The National Museum in Wroclaw

Abakan Red 1969

Magdalena Abakanowicz era un’artista polacca che esplorava con la sua personalissima poetica la pressione dei regimi politici sull’individuo e cercava nuove definizioni per il corpo umano: è morta a Varsavia dove ha vissuto per la maggior parte della sua vita. Aveva 86 anni.
Si è dedicata alla scultura manipolando tessuti e sperimentando l’uso di materiali molto vari, facendo riferimento alla vulnerabilità dell’individuo umano nel mondo moderno. Magdalena Abakanowicz è stata una pioniera, ha iniziato con le sculture astratte di fibre negli anni Cinquanta, quando il suo governo sosteneva il realismo socialista. Le sue prime opere erano tessuti monumentali appesi, che chiamavano «Abakans». Si è dedicata a opere tessili figurative negli anni Settanta con il ciclo «Alterazioni», creando forme umane incomplete e frammentarie.Negli anni successivi ha sperimentato altri materiali come bronzo, legno, pietra e argilla. La sua arte è stata influenzata dalle esperienze personali in Polonia sotto l’occupazione nazista e sovietica durante la seconda guerra mondiale e le successive forme di governo del Paese. Anche se la politica ha ispirato la sua opera, le sculture possiedono un’ambiguità che incoraggia diverse interpretazioni, ma testimoniano il senso dell’esperienza umana. Era una delle personalità più autorevoli e originali dell’arte europea, attraverso installazioni di forte impatto emotivo ha lasciato un segno molto personale influenzando in modo deciso la scultura contemporanea.
di Andrea Fanti

Abakan Orange 1971

Heads (14 pieces), 1973
burlap and hemp rope

Plecy / Backs (1967-80) by M. Abakanowicz

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Embriology (1978-1980), sack canvas, canopy rope, sisal, nylon, metal frames, 200 pieces, dimensions from 5x7 cm to 200x50 cm, part of the collection of the National Museum in Wrocław, photo courtesy of MNWr

Embryology, 1978-1980

Burlap, cotton gauze, hemp rope, nylon and sisal, Overall display dimensions variable

Open Arms, 1980
Burlap and resin
59 x 34 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches
149.9 x 87 x 29.8 cm

War Games "Marrow Bone", 1987
wood and iron
59 x 137 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Anonymous Portrait Head #3, 1987
cotton, resin and sand
25 x 10 x 7 7/8 inches

Plaster Body 5, 1987
Plaster and wood
53 3/4 x 29 1/2 x 25 inches

Anonymous Portrait Head #2, 1987
Cotton, resin, and sand
25 3/4 x 10 1/4 x 8 inches

Angelo, 1989: bronze; 67 x 22 x 13 inches

Magdalena Abakanowicz
Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989
Wood, glass, and iron
8' 6 ½" x 17' 2 ½" x 143' 3" overall
Gift of the artist; additional support provided by Ernest and Patricia Ohnell, the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Cynthia Hazen Polsky, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Jim and Mary Ottaway, the Margaret T. Morris Foundation, the Joseph H. Hazen Foundation Purchase Fund, Vera G. List, and Sherry and Joel Mallin
© The Estate of Magdalena Abakanowicz, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York

Crowd III (50 Figures), 1989

burlap and resin

66 7/8 x 21 5/8 x 17 3/4 inches

Figure in Iron House, 1989

burlap, resin and iron

58 1/4 x 43 3/4 x 35 inches

From the cycle "Hoofed Mammal Heads" - Artubek, 1989

bronze

57 1/8 x 5 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches

From the Cycle "Hoofed Mammal Heads" - Artumaf, 1990

bronze

59 x 39 1/2 x 20 1/4 inches

Lukas in Pyramid, 1991

Burlap, resin and iron

78 3/4 x 35 3/8 x 35 3/8 inches

Show Case with "Unknown Object", 1996
iron, glass, feathers, horns
36 5/8 x 29 7/8 x 18 1/8 inches

Show Case with "Grey Faces", 1996

glass, linen threads

36 5/8 x 29 7/8 x 18 1/8 inches

Drawing: Cycle Corps, 1996

Charcoal on paper

42 3/8 x 32 1/2 inches

“Bambini,” a group of sculptures by Ms. Abakanowicz installed in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Bambini, 1998-99
bronze, unique
43 x 15 x 10 inches

Figure Sitting on a Pole, 1999
Bronze
82 5/8 x 24 x 22 7/8 inches
209.9 x 61 x 58.1 cm

Magdalena Abakanowicz (20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. She is notable for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium. She is widely regarded as one of Poland's most internationally-acclaimed artists. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.

Early life

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born to a noble landowner family in Falenty. Her mother descended from old Polish nobility. Her father came from a Polonized Tatar family, which traced its origins to Abaqa Khan (a 13th-century Mongol chieftain). Her father's family fled Russia to the newly independent Poland after the October Revolution.
The Russian invasion of 1920 forced her family to flee their home, after which they moved to the city of Gdańsk. When she was nine Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. Her family endured the war years living on the outskirts of Warsaw. After the war and resulting Soviet occupation, the family moved to the small city of Tczew near Gdańsk, in northern Poland, where they hoped to start a new life.
Under Soviet control, the Polish government officially adopted Socialist realism as the only acceptable art form which should be pursued by artists. Originally conceived by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, Socialist realism, in nature, had to be 'national in form' and 'socialist in content'. Other art forms being practiced at the time in the West, such as Modernism, were culturally outlawed and heavily censored in all Eastern bloc nations, including Poland.^{[citation needed]}
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, the leading art school in Poland.
Her years at the university, 1950–1954, coincided with some of the harshest assaults made on art by the Soviet leadership. By utilizing the doctrine of 'Socialist realism', all art forms in Soviet occupied nations were forced to adhere to strict guidelines and limitations that subordinated the arts to the needs and demands of the State. Realist artistic depictions based on the national 19th-century academic tradition were the only form of artistic expression advocated by in Poland at the time. 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:

I liked to draw, seeking the form by placing lines, one next to the other. The professor would come with an eraser in his hand and rub out every unnecessary line on my drawing, leaving a thin, dry contour. I hated him for it.

While studying at the University she was required to take several textile design classes, learning the art of weaving, screen printing, and fiber design from instructors such as Anna Sledziewska, Eleonora Plutymska, and Maria Urbanowicz. These instructors and skills would greatly influence Abakanowicz's work, as well as that of other prominent Polish artists of the time.

First artworks

Following her education at the Academy, Abakanowicz began to produce her first artistic works. Due to the fact that she spent most of her academic life moving from place to place, much of her earlier artwork was lost or damaged, with only a few, delicate plant drawings surviving. Between 1956 and 1959, she produced some of her earliest known works; a series of large gouaches and watercolors on paper and sewn-together linen sheets. These works, described as being 'biomorphic” in composition, depicted imaginary plants, birds, exotic fish, and seashells, among other biomorphic shapes and forms. Joanna Inglot wrote in The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz about these early works: “[they] pointed to Abakanowicz’s early fascination with the natural world and its processes of germination, growth, blooming, and sprouting. They seem to capture the very energy of life, a quality that would become a constant feature of her art.” Abakanowicz said:

My gouaches were as large as the wall permitted. Depressed by years of study, I was fighting back by making my gouaches for myself. For so long it had been repeated that I could not do it; my response had to be on a big scale. I wanted to take a walk among imaginary plants.

It was also during this time that Poland began to lift some of the heavy political pressures imposed by the Soviet Union, mainly due to the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953. In 1956, under the new party leadership of Władysław Gomułka, Poland experienced a dramatic social and cultural shift. The shift resulted in the liberalization of the forms and content of art, with the Stalinistic methods of art form being openly criticized by the Gomulka 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 Eastern bloc. 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." Constructivism began to influence her work in the late 1950s as she adopted more a more geometric and structured approach. Never fully accepting Constructivism, she searched for her own “artistic language and for a way to make her art more tactile, intuitive, and personal.” 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.

Opus

Abakans

The 1960s saw some of the most important works produced during Abakanowicz's career. In 1967, she began producing gigantic three-dimensional fiber works called Abakans. These works would secure her place in the art world as one of the great artists of the time and influence all of the subsequent work she created .
Each Abakan is made out of woven material using Abakanowicz's own technique. The material used for many of these pieces was found, often collecting sisal ropes from harbors, untwining them into threads and dying them. Hung from the ceiling, Abakans reach sizes as large as thirteen feet with sometimes only a few inch clearance from the ground.

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 The 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.
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. She continued the subject matter of the human condition but changed her medium; her burlap and resin figurative sculptures were now being made out of bronze, such as Bronze Crowd (1990–91) and Puellae (1992). She stated in a speech given at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź:

In consequence, the expression of art saturated with history, deformed by modernity, diverging from the direction of art in the free world. Perhaps the experience of the crowd, waiting passively in line, but ready to trample, destroy or adore on command like a headless creature, became the core of my analysis. And maybe it was a fascination with the scale of the human body. Or a desire to determine the minimal amount necessary to express the whole.

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. During the 1990s Abakanowicz was also commissioned to design a model of an ecologically-oriented city. She also choreographed dance.

Agora

Abakanowicz's final round of work includes a project called Agora, which is a permanent installation located at the southern end of Chicago's Grant Park, next to the Roosevelt Road Metra station. It consists of 106 cast iron figures, each about nine feet tall. All the figures are similar in shape, but different in details. The artist and her three assistants created models for each figure by hand, and the casting took place from 2004 to 2006. The surface of each figure resembles a tree bark or wrinkled skin. The work creates a feeling of crowdedness, hence the name "agora". Furthermore, all the bodies end at the torso, giving them an eerie, anonymous look.

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)
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)
Germany's Star of the Grand Cross for Service to Germany (2010)
Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, International Sculpture Center, (Hamilton, NJ, USA) (2005)

Doctorates and honors

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)
Orden Pour le Mérite fur Wissenschaften und Künste, Berlin, Germany (2000)
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 Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland (2002)
Honoris Causa doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2002)

Quotes

“My work comes from the experience of crowds, injustice, and aggression… I feel an affinity for art when it was made a form of existence, like when shamans worked in the territory between men and unknown powers… I try to bewitch the crowd.”
“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."

Sitting Figure on Tall Base, 2001

Kayser Infant I, 2001

Bronze

66 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 4 Seated Figures, 2002; Gift of the Artist

Coexistence (5), 2002

Coexistence (13), 2002

burlap

85 x 25 x 23 inches

Nierozpoznani ("The Unrecognised Ones") (2002) in the Cytadela park, Poznań, Poland

The Son of Gigant, 2003
bronze
85 x 121 1/2 x 26 inches

Winged Brother, 2005: bronze; 78 3/4 x 20 7/8 x 31 1/2 inches

Winged Sister, 2005
bronze
78 3/4 x 16 7/8 x 31 1/2 inches

Magdalena Abakanowicz, ‘Osiel’, 2005-2006

(whole installation)

Space of Unknown Growth (Europos Parkas Lithuania)

Space of Unknown Growth by Magdalena Abakanowicz in Open Air Museum of the Centre of Europe. Image for Wikipedia provided by Open Air Museum of the Centre of Europe, 2006. 800x536 pixels. True Color (24 bit). 1286400 Bytes.

Agora by Magdalena Abakanowicz, in the south end of Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois, at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and East Roosevelt Road. The entire installation is about 300 feet (91 m) long.