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Magdalena Abakanowicz

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. June 20, 1930, Falenty, Poland) is an
   abstract Polish sculptor. 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 Poznan, Poland from 1965 to
   1990 and a visiting professor at UCLA in 1984. Magdalena Abakanowicz
   currently lives and works in Warsaw.

Career

Early Life

   Magdalena Abakanowicz was born into an aristocratic Polish- Russian
   family. Her mother, who was Polish, had roots connected to the Polish
   nobility of ages past. Magdalena's father, who was of Polish, Russian,
   and Tatar ancestry which dated back to the great leader of the
   Mongolian tribe Abaka-Khan, fled Russia at the time of the 1917
   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 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
   small city of Tczew near Gdansk, 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 created 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.

   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 w Gdyni. After her
   graduation from the Liceum in 1949, Abakanowicz attended the Gdansk
   Academy of Fine Arts, located then in town of Sopot. In 1950,
   Abakanowicz moved back to Warsaw to begin her studies at the Academy of
   Fine Arts, the premier art school in Poland.

   Her years at the university, 1950-1954, coincided with some of the
   harshest assault 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 nineteenth-century academic
   tradition was the only the 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 fibre 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 other prominent Polish
   artists at the time.

First Artworks

   Following her education at the Academy, Abakanowicz's 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 to 1959, she produced some of her earliest
   known works; a series of 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 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,
   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 fibre design movement and resulted in her
   inclusion into the the first Biennale Internationale de le Tapisserie
   in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962. The event opened the way to her
   international success.

Abakanowicz's Work

Abakans

   The 1960s saw some of the most important works produced during
   Abakanowicz's career. In 1967, she began procuring gigantic
   three-dimensional fibre 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 her work she has produced since.

   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 robes 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
   representation 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 Embriology 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
   society and nature as a whole and its condition and position in modern
   world. 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 individually creativity and intellect
   in favour of the collective interest. These works also contrast her
   earlier Abakan series, which were individually powerful pieces where as
   the figurative sculptures lost their individuality in favour 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
   continue the subject matter of human condition but changed her medium;
   her berlap and resin human figure 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:
   Nierozpoznani (Polish for: Unrecogniseds) (2002) in Poznań (whole
   installation)
   Nierozpoznani (Polish for: Unrecogniseds) (2002) in Poznań ( whole
   installation)

   “  “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 unique works is titled War Games, which is a
   cycle of monumental structures comprised of huge trunks of old trees,
   with their branches and bark removed. Partly bandaged with rags and
   hugged with 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. Also during the 1990s Abakanowicz was commissioned
   to design a model of an ecologically-oriented city. She has also
   choreographed dances.

Agora

   Abakanowicz's most recent work included a project called Agora, which
   is a permanent project for the Chicago Grant Park. It consists of 106
   iron cast figures, each about nine feet tall, making it the largest
   figurative sculpture of the current time.

Selected Solo Exhibits

     * Xavier Fourcade Gallery, New York City (1985)
     * Turske a. Turske Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland (1988)
     * Mucsarnok Palace of Exhibitions, Budapest, Hungary (1988)
     * Stadel Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, Germany (1989)
     * Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (1991)
     * Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1992)
     * Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (1993)
     * P.S.1 Museum, New York (1993)
     * Fundacio Miro, Mallorca, Spain (1994)
     * Marlborough Gallery, Madrid, Spain (1994)
     * Kordegarda Gallery, Warsaw, Poland (1994)
     * Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England (1995)
     * Manchester City Art Galleries, England (1995)
     * Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Denmark (1996)
     * Oriel Mostyn, Wales (1996)
     * Gallerie Marwan Hoss, Paris (1996)

Permanent works avaible in public space

     * Nierozpoznani, Poznan, Poland (2002)

Awards

     * Grand Prix of Sao Paolo Biennale, Sao Paolo, Brazil (1965)
     * Gottfried von Herder Prize, Vienna, Austria (1979)
     * Alfred Jurzykowski Prize, New York (1982)
     * Award for Distinction in Sculpture, granted by the Sculpture
       Centre, New York (1993)
     * Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts, Mexico (1997)
     * Commander Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1998)
     * Officier de L' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France (1999)
     * Cavaliere nell Ordine Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2000)
     * Visionaries! Award granted by American Craft Museum (2000)
     * Award for the entire Creative Activity granted by the Polish
       Minister of Culture Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed by the
       International Sculpture Centre in New York (2005)

Doctorates and Honours

     * 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 Akademie der Kunste, 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, Lodz, Poland
       (1998)
     * Orden Pour le merite fur Wissenschaften und Kunste, 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 Poznan,
       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.”
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