Magdalena Abakanowicz

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(b Felenty, nr Warsaw, 1930). Polish textile artist. She studied at the College of Fine Arts, Sopot, and graduated in 1955 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. At the beginning of her career she was interested in drawing, painting and sculpture, but after 1960 she concentrated on textile arts in the broad sense of the term. Breaking with tradition, she initiated bold experiments with fibre and fabric. Her work contributed to the revolutionary textile movement known as FIBRE ART and finally entered the domain of modern sculpture.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Polish abstract sculptor and weaver Magdalena Abakanowicz (born 1930) is considered by critics to be one of the most extraordinary creative artists in the world. A pioneer in her field, her work has been featured in more than a hundred group shows and forty solo exhibitions, and is on display in over forty museums including Warsaw, Amsterdam, Germany, New York, Brazil, Japan, Paris, and Chicago.

Early Life

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born on June 20, 1930, in Falenty, Poland eight miles west of Warsaw. Her father was Konstanty Abakanowicz, a Russian Tartar descendant of Abaka - Khan - great - grandson of Genghis Khan - who fled to Poland to escape the Bolshevik revolutions. Her mother was Helena Domaszowska Abakanowicz, descended from the Polish nobility and one in a long line of Polish aristocrats. The second of two daughters, Magdalena's mother had desperately wanted a son, and Magdalena always felt that she was a great disappointment in that regard. Abakanowicz was raised in a thirty - two room mansion on a country estate in eastern Poland, and her elevated social class isolated her from other children and her parents.

Surrounded by servants and tutors, Abakanowicz struggled with a deep loneliness which she held at bay by spending the majority of her waking hours communing with the natural world in the ancient woods and fields that surrounded her home. She later wrote a prose poem titled Portrait X 20 that described her fascination with the cohesive connections between the flora and fauna she encountered, and her desire to be included in that cosmic unity. When she was not being drilled by tutors or cared for by servants, she ran wild in the forests, striving to feel at home among the gnarled, towering trees and soft, vibrant vegetation.

Abakanowicz's life of privilege ended abruptly in 1939, when German Nazis invaded Poland. She was nine years old when the tanks rolled onto her parents' estate grounds, and the woods and fields she had sought refuge in became a war zone crawling with soldiers and thieves. Her father quickly joined the Polish Resistance, and their home acted as a refuge for partisans and Jews. The young girl learned how to assemble and shoot a gun, but as she mentioned in Barbara Rose's 1994 biography Abakanowicz, losing the forests left her feeling "hollow, as if [her] insides had been removed and the exterior, unsupported by anything, shrank, losing its form." In 1943, a drunken Wehrmacht soldier broke into their home and shot Abakanowicz's mother right before her eyes - the bullet severing her mother's right arm at the shoulder. At the end of World War II, Abakanowicz and her family found themselves permanently exiled by the encroaching German forces, and fled to Warsaw.

While living in Warsaw, Abakanowicz's family had to keep their aristocratic background hidden. They were classified as enemies of the people because of their previous wealth, and had to sell everything they owned on the black market to avoid suspicion. Abakanowicz's parents opened a modest newspaper stand and did their best to keep their affluent heritage a secret. In August and September of 1944, Warsaw was rocked and decimated by a bloody uprising. A fourteen - year - old Abakanowicz watched women and children being strapped to tanks and used as human shields. She served as a nurse's assistant in a makeshift clinic, and was exposed to the broken and damaged bodies of the patients who were treated there - imprinted with images of death and disfigurement that would inform her art later in life.

In 1947, Poland was occupied by the liberating efforts of the Soviet army, and Communist representatives took over the Polish government. Abakanowicz wanted to study art, but to do so she had to convince her parents and fight the ban that had been imposed by Stalin against the previously wealthy attending universities. In 1949, she lied about her family history with the blessing of her parents, and was admitted into an art school in Sopot on the Baltic coast.

Education

Although Abakanowicz began her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot, a year later, in 1950, she transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and remained there until 1955. She lived with various families who were willing to house students and supported herself and her education by selling her blood, a pint every two weeks, as well as performing multiple odd jobs such as coaching athletes, cleaning the streets, small construction, and all - night shifts holding a lamp for men repairing streetcar lines. Her artistic education coincided with the period in which Social Realism was both popular and expected. Propaganda art featuring paintings of happy peasants smiling as they worked was prevalent, and despite the distaste Abakanowicz had for the artistic work of the time, she knew she must persevere and obtain a degree if she wanted to enter the Polish Artists' Union and work as a sculptor someday.

The young artist was unable to study sculpture right away, and initially focused on painting. Her nonrealistic images, however, offended her teachers who believed that the purpose of art was to help build a perfect society. Hoping to exercise the freedom to truly express herself in this repressive atmosphere, she gravitated towards textile work and weaving, a low - visibility and traditionally female medium which allowed her to experiment without attracting the wrong kind of attention. Abakanowicz graduated with a M.A. from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1955, and began to pursue a career as a working artist. On September 22, 1956, Abakanowicz married civil engineer Jan Kosmowski, who remains a loving partner and presently acts as her business manager, engineering consultant, and photographer. 1957 saw an influx of creative energy in Warsaw, and Abakanowicz attended gatherings of artists, intellectuals, scientists, and politicians in the one - room apartment of Constructivist painter Henryk Stazewski. She thought of this as her true schooling, and found the company both challenging and inspiring.

Life as an Artist

In the Spring of 1960, Abakanowicz was granted her first one - woman show at Galerie Kordegarda, in Warsaw. Just hours before opening, however, a government official demanded that it be shut down due to the abstract nature of the pieces Abakanowicz had prepared. Seasoned weaver and tapestry artist Maria Laszkiewicz had come to view the exhibit, and although no one was allowed to enter the building, she saw some of Abakanowicz's pieces through an open window. She was so impressed with the work that she took the young artist under her wing, allowing Abakanowicz to work in her basement studio for many years. In 1962, Laszkiewicz entered Abakanowicz in the First International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland.

At the Biennial, Abakanowicz entered a group of textile objects that were awarded a category of their own by the judges because they did not fit into any of the show's established groups. People began calling them Abakans - based on the artist's name - because they defied categorization. The structures were assembled from pieces and hung from the ceiling to create a uniquely expressive environment. The Abakans were unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Viewers and critics alike stumbled over images and words in an attempt to describe their powerful effect. In a single 1995 Art Journal review, the Abakans were likened to "cocoons," "underwater vegetation," "rain - swollen clouds," "cloaks," "chambers," "forests," "shells." They created a wave of interest that swept the international artistic community, and effectively launched her career as a ground - breaking artist.

In 1965, Abakanowicz became a member of Z.A.I.K.S. - the Union of Polish Artists, Writers and Composers. She also obtained a position as an instructor at the National College of Fine Art in Poznah. She rose to the level of associate professor in 1974, and full professor in 1979. She remained until 1990, when she retired from teaching to devote her full energy to her own work. Abakanowicz made it clear that she would never abandon her native country of Poland, regardless of the difficulties of working in a post - Solidarity culture. She always faced the economic and environmental challenges with determination and patience, standing in line for meat and dealing with rationing along with other Polish housewives. It is an exceedingly bureaucratic trial to travel and work outside the country, but she feels infinitely at home in Poland, and believes that living there colors her work.

Critical Reception

Many critics feel that Abakanowicz's isolated, provincial upbringing provided an artistic sensibility rooted in magic and myth rather than modernity. Her art has been described as abiding in the spaces between organic and man - made, life and death, creation and destruction, wisdom and madness, dream and reality. The group, crowd, parade, and tribe are a recurring theme in her work, with each individual piece cast from the same mold, then enhanced until it is slightly irregular. When displayed together, some viewers find that they express an essential humanity, while others find them terrifying and anonymous. Abakanowicz personally controls where and how her art is shown, always installing the pieces herself so that the result is site - specific, utilizing the space the pieces are placed in as an integral part of the overall expression. The end product is described by the Smithsonian's John Dornberg as "haunting, anguished, personal art charged with energy and emotions that jar the senses." Although most critics agree that the pieces operate as powerful, emotional structures that relate to the world we live in and the shape, unreliability, and tensions of the human body, the 1997 Chambers Biographical Dictionary also labels the exhibitions as "primitive and disturbing."

Abakanowicz's better known works include Abakans and Black Garment (1969), Heads (1975), Seated Figures (1974 - 1979), Backs and Embryology - described by the November 1993 issue of Artforum International as "A morass of 600 hand - stitched elements made of burlap, cotton, gauze, hemp, nylon, and sisal, shaped like boulders, stones and pebbles, [and] arranged to allow the viewer to walk among [them] . . . like swaddling clothes for invisible babies, these elements formed a distressing pile of organic structures, thrown on top of each other as if in a collective grave" (1978 - 1981), Katharsis (1985), Incarnations (1986), War Games - misfit trees deemed too irregular for wood, and too dangerous to be left standing by the side of the road, salvaged and made into art, Trunks, Arboreal Architecture, Wheel and Rope, Marrow Bone, Negev (1987), Space of Dragon (1988), Zyk, Winged Trunk, Anasta (1989), Great Ursa, Infantes, Circus, Puellae - a host of headless, bronze figures lined up "as if facing a mass execution or awaiting a roll call" according to the Artforum International review (1992), Hand - like Trees - which, according to the January 1997 issue of Art in America featured "stubby fingers spreading open in a helpless gesture of entreaty or closed tight in fists against the sky evok[ing] a voiceless cry protesting the injustice of the universe" (1992 - 1993), and Unrecognized (2002). Each piece, as well as each series or cycle, requires years of work. Embryology took four years to complete, while Seated Figures and Backs took five and six years, respectively.

The Greatest Risk

Abakanowicz remains one of the cutting - edge artists of the times. She is eclectic and outspoken, a physically robust and emotionally vibrant individual. She also prefers to leave the meaning of her art up to the psyche of each viewer, and never explains her art. She told the Smithsonian's Dornberg that "people today are afraid to judge or understand such objects in their own way. We have got accustomed to having everything explained, explained and explained away . . . If you think it needs explaining, you wouldn't understand it anyway. At the bottom of all art, there is mystery." From her first government - banned solo show, to her present - day artistic efforts, Abakanowicz remains both controversial and admired. As she stated in the Smithsonian interview with Dornberg, "We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question . . . I was searching for the greatest risk; to make art of something that is not considered art." As her status has risen among the artistic communities of the world, the risks she has taken have provided art that will evoke powerful responses from viewers for years to come.

Books

Chassie, Karen, Marquis Who's Who in America, Marquis Who's Who, 58th Ed. Vol.1, 2004.

Chilvers, Ian, A Dictionary of Twentieth - Century Art, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Chilvers, Ian, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Commire, Anne, Women in World History, Gale Group, Yorkin Publications, 1999.

Dunford, Penny, A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America Since 1850, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Hillstrom, Laurie Collier, and Kevin Hillstrom, Contemporary Women Artists, St. James Press, 1999.

Langmuir, Erika, and Norbert Lynton, The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists, Yale University Press, 2000.

Naylor, Colin, and Genesis P - Orridge, Contemporary Artists, St. James Press, 1977.

Parry, Melanie, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 1997.

The Prestel Dictionary of Art and Artists in the Twentieth - Century, Prestel, 2000.

Richardson, Francine, Marquis Who's Who in the World, Marquis Who's Who, 2002.

Rose, Barbara, Abakanowicz, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1994.

Sleeman, Elizabeth, The 2004 International Who's Who, 67 Ed., Europa Publications, 2003.

Uglow, Jennifer S., The Continuum Dictionary of Women's Biography, The Continuum Publishing Company, 1989.

Zilboorg, Caroline, Women's Firsts, Gale Research, 1997.

Periodicals

Artforum International, November 1993.

Art in America, April 1985; January 1997; March 2001; December 2002.

Art Journal, Spring 1995.

New York Times Biographical Service, November 1992.

Smithsonian, April 1985.

Four on a Bench, 1990. Burlap, resin, and wood; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Magdalena Abakanowicz (born June 20, 1930, in Falenty, Poland) is a 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 Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at UCLA in 1984. Magdalena Abakanowicz currently lives and works in Warsaw.

Contents 1 Career 1.1 Early life 1.2 First artworks 2 Abakanowicz's Work 2.1 Abakans 2.2 Humanoid sculptures 2.3 War Games 2.4 Agora 3 Selected solo exhibits 4 Permanent works available in public space 5 Awards 6 Doctorates and Honors 7 Quotes 8 Notes 9 See also 10 External links

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 Lipka Tatar ancestry which dated back to the great leader of the Mongolian tribe Abaka-Khan, fled Russia at the time of 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 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'.^[1] 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 Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, then located in the town of Sopot. In 1950, Abakanowicz moved back to Warsaw to begin her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, the leading 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.^[2] 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.^[3]

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.[4]

”

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 other prominent Polish artists at the time..^[5]

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 to 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.^[5] 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.”^[5] 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.[6]

”

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."^[6] 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.”^[7] 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.^[7]

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 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 her work she has produced since.^[8]

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.^[9] 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.

80 Backs (1976-80)

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 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.^[10] These works have close connections to Abakanowicz's life living in a Communist regime which repressed individually 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 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:

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.”[11]

”

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.^[12] During the 1990s Abakanowicz was also commissioned to design a model of an ecologically-oriented city. She has also choreographed dances.

Agora

Abakanowicz's most recent work has included a project called Agora, which is a permanent project 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.

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 Center, 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 available in public space

• Nierozpoznani, Poznań, Poland (2002)
• "Manus Ultimus" Paris, France, Jardin des Tuileries 1997
• "Bronze Crowd", Dallas, Texas, USA 1990-1991

Awards

• Grand Prix of Sao Paolo Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil (1965)
• Gottfried von Herder Prize, Vienna, Austria (1979)
• Alfred Jurzykowski Prize, New York (1982)
• Award for Distinction in Sculpture, granted by the Sculpture Center, 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 Center in New York (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 Akademie der Künste, 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.”^[13]

Notes

1. ^ Inglot, Joanna, The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz (Excerpt), University of California Press, 2004, pg. 31. [1]
2. ^ Inglot p. 32
3. ^ Inglot p. 27
4. ^ Ibid. pg. 27
5. ^ ^{a b c} Inglot p. 28
6. ^ ^{a b} Inglot p. 34
7. ^ ^{a b} Inglot p. 39
8. ^ Brenson, Michael, Magdalena Abakanowicz's Abakans, Art Journal. Volume 54. Issue: 1, 1995 [2]
9. ^ Ibid.
10. ^ Kitowska-Lysiak, Malgorzata, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Visual Arts Profile, Polish Culture, Art History Institute of the Catholic University of Lublin, 2004 [3]
11. ^ Abakanowicz in Cracow, Warsaw Voice, 3 May 1998
12. ^ Kitowska-Lysiak, Malgorzata, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Visual Arts Profile, Polish Culture, Art History Institute of the Catholic University of Lublin, 2004 [4]
13. ^ Magdalena Abakanowicz, The World's Women On-Line!

See also

• Abakanowicz
• List of Polish artists
• Socialist realism

External links

• Official site

Museums:

• Magdalena Abakanowicz at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Magdalena Abakanowicz at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Magdalena Abakanowicz at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Articles:

• Magdalena Abakanowicz's 'Abakans.' (fiber sculptures), Art Journal
• Magdalena Abakanowicz, artnet
• The Jackboot Has Lifted. Now the Crowds Crush, By Rita Reif, The New York Times, June 3, 2001
• (French) Magdalena Abakanowicz

Schools:

• Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts

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