Magdalena abakanowicz

”I feel overwhelmed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such quantity. A crowd of people or birds, insect or leaves, is a mysterious assemblage of variants ofa certain prototype, a riddle of nature abhorrent to exact repetition or inability to produce it, just as a human hand can not repeat its own gesture”.

Magdalena Abakanowicz for many years hasdealt with the issue of “the countless”.

Each of her figures is an individuality, with its own expression, with specific details of skin. Organic, with the imprint of the artist’s fingers. Theirsurface is natural like tree bark or animal fur or wrinkled skin. Like all her sculptures also these works are unique objects.

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in an aristocratic Polish-Russian family onher parent’s estate in Poland. The war broke out when she was nine years old. Then came the revolution imposed by Russia and the forty-five years of Soviet domination.

Poland was a politicallyvolatile country where instability was a permanent state. She has learned to escape to her corner, to make the best of things, to use whatever was viable and even to make gigantic works in a tiny studio.Her art has always addressed the problems of dignity and courage. This dignity resistance and will of survival conceal her individual personal affinities to the culture of Poland, the country where shehas grown up, to this country’s political situation, and to the realities of existence of an artist, an intellectual.
The metaphoric language of her work has achieved a point of junction, whichstill is a challenge for mankind, for all its sophisticated civilisation. This is the point where the organic meets the non – organic, where the still alive meets that which is already dead, where allthat exist in oppression meet all that strive for liberation in every meaning of this word. With forty years of work behind her one can see her development like a map unfolded on the table.

On this...