Magdalena Abakanowicz

Biography

In 1965 the São Paulo Biennale gave a gold medal to a woven piece that no longer hung on a wall. Its author, a thirty-five-year-old Polish woman, worked in sisal and old ships’ ropes; her works came to be called by her surname, Abakans.

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born on 20 June 1930 in Falenty, near Warsaw, into a landowning family. Her mother, Helena Domaszewska, came from the old Polish nobility. Her father, Konstanty Abakanowicz, was a descendant of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, and his family had fled Russia for Poland after the revolution of 1917. The family lived out the war on the outskirts of Warsaw and then settled in Tczew, near Gdańsk. In her youth Abakanowicz was a runner: she competed for clubs in Gdynia, Gdańsk and Tczew, won gold in a relay at the Polish championships in 1947, and silver and bronze medals in 1947 and 1948. She studied at the secondary art school in Gdynia, then in Sopot, and from 1950 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, in the years of strict Socialist Realism, the official doctrine that required art to be realist in form and socialist in content. To be admitted, she reportedly had to pass herself off as a clerk’s daughter, since her noble origins stood in the way. She called the Academy rigid and recalled a professor who rubbed out every “unnecessary” line in her drawing with an eraser. As part of the required programme she took textiles, screen printing and fibre design with Anna Sledziewska, Eleonora Plutyńska and Maria Urbanowicz. She received her diploma in 1954 according to some sources, in 1955 according to others.

After 1956, when the political thaw began in Poland, she made a series of large gouaches and watercolours of imaginary plants, birds and seashells. “I wanted to take a walk among imaginary plants,” she said. There followed a short period of geometry, under the influence of Constructivism, and then weaving. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in the spring of 1960: four woven works and gouaches. In 1962 she took part in the first Lausanne Biennale of woven wall art, and this opened the international stage to her.

She made Abakans from the mid-1960s (the start of the series is dated to either 1965 or 1967): woven three-dimensional forms hanging from the ceiling, in places as tall as a person or taller. She often chose her material herself, collecting sisal ropes in harbours, unravelling them into strands and dyeing them. In 1969 the Abakans were shown in the group exhibition “Wall Hangings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By her own account, she wanted to strip woven wall hangings of their utilitarian function completely. For an administrative building in ’s-Hertogenbosch she made “Black Environment” (1970–1978), in which black sisal filled an office with waves of curtain covering 184 square metres. From 1965 to 1990 she taught at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań, as a professor from 1979, and in 1984 she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the 1970s she turned to the human figure. She sewed burlap together and stiffened it with resin: this produced “Heads” (1973–1975), “Alterations” (1974–1975), a row of seated hollow figures without heads, and “Backs” (1976–1980), about eighty torsos differing slightly from one another. “Crowd” (1986–1987) and other cycles followed later. Critics, and she herself, explained these works by life in conditions where the collective counted for more than the individual, and by the bewilderment of a single person in the mass. To my mind, it matters that there are always many figures and almost never faces.

In the mid-1980s she took up bronze, then wood, stone, cast iron and stainless steel. For the Giuliano Gori foundation in Florence she created “Katarsis” in 1986, thirty-three bronze torsos meant to be shown outdoors. Then came “Bronze Crowd” (1990–1991), “Puellae” (1992), “War Games” of tree trunks stripped of branches and bound with iron hoops, and the bronze “Hand-like Trees”, among them “Manus Ultimus” in the Tuileries Garden. In Milwaukee stand her “Birds of Knowledge of Good and Evil” (2001). For Poznań, for the city’s 750th anniversary, she cast 112 figures in iron, “Unrecognized” (2001–2002). And “Agora” in Chicago’s Grant Park consists of 106 headless, armless cast-iron figures about 2.7 metres tall, cast in 2004–2006 from her models; their surface resembles bark or wrinkled skin.

Among her awards are the Herder Prize (1979), the Jurzykowski Prize (1982), the Order of Polonia Restituta (1998) and the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts (1999). She held honorary doctorates, including from the Royal College of Art in London (1974) and from the Poznań University of Fine Arts, which now bears her name. Abakanowicz died on 20 April 2017 in Warsaw and was buried on 27 April at the Powązki Military Cemetery.