Magdalena abakanowicz tate review

Magdalena abakanowicz sculpture
Magdalena abakanowicz: every tangle of thread and rope
80 backs by magdalena abakanowicz

•

Protect me from what I want

Agora IIYellow AbakanThe Group of SevenRed AlbakanPlecyMammal HeadThe Group of SevenKlatka i plecy

Magdalena Abakanowicz (Polish, b.1930) is best known for her textile sculptures of biomorphic forms. At the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts she studied drawing and painting in the Socialist Realist style, as well as textile design, screen printing, and fiber design. Her early work includes a series of gouaches and watercolors on linen sheets, which depict imaginary plants and animals. After she graduated, the Polish government was less strict about the form and content of art, and artists were allowed to travel to Western cities. Abakanowicz was particularly influenced by the geometric structures of Constructivist art. Her series Abakans, begun in 1967, are giant sculptures, woven from a variety of fibers, that hang a few inches off the ground.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Abakanowicz made several series of anthropomorphic textile sculptures. Backs (1976–1980) was a series of 80 versions of the human trunk made from burlap and resin, and Em

•

Abakans – The New Humans of Magdalena Abakanowicz

I can see a group of approximately 250 people, all of them standing. Children and adults. I come closer and I realize they have no heads. I come even closer and I touch one of them. He’s soft but his skin is weirdly coarse… It’s not the beginning to a horror. It’s a description of Abakans, unique sculptures created by Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Abakans is a name derived from her surname and it describes her three-dimensional textiles which cease to be just textiles and receive a new life as sculpture. Abakanowicz was a pioneer who transformed the idea of a textile as a two-dimensional object hung on the wall: “The Abakans irritated. They were untimely. There was the French tapestry in weaving, pop-art and conceptual art, and here there were some complicated, huge, magical (forms)…”, she said about Abakans. They may look scary or unnerving because of their deformed shapes and big scale. Especially since they always come in series so they look like an army of aliens.

Abakans are made

•

In the mid-1970s, Magdalena Abakanowicz starts making her first series of figurative sculptures: The Seated Figures (1974-1984) and Backs (1976-1980). At this time, she is already an artist of international renown. Her mysterious, abstract Abakans have brought her first international awards and provided opportunities for extensive and distant travels.

During this period, she also meets Mariusz Hermansdorfer, a contemporary art curator and later the longtime director of the National Museum in Wrocław who would gather the largest collection of Abakanowcz’s works in Poland. Today, it takes pride of place in our Museum.
In 1986, the National Museum in Wrocław acquires her two very important works: The Embryology (1978-1988), a piece composed of almost 100 elements, earlier featured at the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and twenty six figures from the dramatic Backs series (1976-1980).

A year or two later, still a high school student, I visit the National Museum in Wrocław. I enter the gallery featuring the works of Abakanowicz and I am awestruc